


So Much For Someday

by rainylemons



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Addiction, Drug Use, Dubious Consent, F/M, Hurt/Comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-16
Updated: 2012-08-16
Packaged: 2017-11-12 07:01:35
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 27,286
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/488021
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rainylemons/pseuds/rainylemons
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The August before Dean returns from Hell, a young homeless woman possessed by a demon is saved by Sam and spends a few days in the sweltering heat, trying to help him through a strange illness that’s somehow tied to the silver flask he carries in his pocket. Outside POV.</p>
            </blockquote>





	So Much For Someday

**Author's Note:**

> **Author’s Notes:** This was written for the very first and very fine ohsam H/C Fic Challenge and for this prompt by nwspaprtaxis who I hope forgives me for not sticking to the prompt to the letter. So, it’s like this. NPT  & I talked a little bit about how this would be something better from a POV other than Sam’s for many reasons. I mentioned that I kind of thought I’d like to do the POV of an original character and NPT encouraged me to do whatever I wanted because OCs are cool. I SHAMELESSLY took advantage of that. It’s no secret – I love writing original characters. They’re fun for me and because I kinda suck, I use them to explain my setting/situation more than just about anything else. So, if you think that’s going to not be your kind of thing, that’s cool. Also, just because I feel like I should probably get it out there, since I was indulging myself anyway, I just kept on going. This is as much a fic about my OC as it is about Sam, though, don’t worry, it all revolves around Sam. But, yeah, I was pretty damned shameless in my Sam watching, my OFC playing… was I writing fic or playing with SPN Barbies here while watching soap operas? I don’t even know, man, but I’m a bad fangirl and I kinda had a good time and freaking like this quiet, little fic. Well! Now that I’ve apologized all over myself for picking on Sam, making him puke, admiring his Sammyness, and playing around with OCs in that sort of way that makes people want to throw rocks at fic authors, I think I should probably just shut up and let you get on with it. (If you hung around this long. LOL)  
>  **Great Big Thanks to:** embroiderama for the life saving beta – once again, this girl saves my bacon and does it brilliantly. Any weirdness you might find is all on me. I’d also like to thank the wonderful ohsam mods for the comm (hearts!) and the challenge. Thanks also to nwspaprtaxis for the prompt, putting up with my insane lateness, and telling me repeatedly that it would be great to do whatever I wanted. Thanks to you all!

Cosette takes her last needle of heroin on Christmas Day. She has plans to wander to the mission on Ninth Street later for a free turkey dinner and maybe some new socks or a handful of condoms – whatever they’re giving away this year – but Austin feels like sharing his little stash since it’s Christmas and Cosette doesn’t think anyone at the mission will really notice or mind if she shows up higher than a kite. Austin is a lot like her. He suffering from intentional, indeterminate age, could be eighteen, could be eighty and like her, he’s finely boned, almost elegant beneath his layers. He’s been used more harshly than she has, has permanent trouble with his bowels and a sickness to him that tells her she’s smart to use her own needle when they shoot up. If she plays at the walking dead, he’s the embodiment of it and it makes her sad to think that he probably won’t be around for another Christmas Day after this one.

The smoke comes after she’s injected the warm heroin into her vein and she watches it roil in through the cracks in the floor, needle dumb and forgotten, sticking out of her arm as it comes to her.

“Austin…”

“Run away, Cosette,” he tells her. He’s the only one who calls her by name, the only one who probably knows her by anything other than Etta. He’s too weak to run, too weak to stand and, from the smell of it, probably half sitting in his own shit as it is.

She takes hold of him, the needle falls out of her arm and she doesn’t know what she’s going to attempt. Run? Drag him away? It doesn’t matter because she gets no further than her knees before she’s choking on the smoke and fighting for one more breath, though she wonders why she even bothers when life hasn’t given her much at all to fight for.

Then? She’s looking through the glass darkly. She feels Austin’s neck snap with the exact sound and feel of a wishbone from a turkey being pulled apart. Cosette makes a wish at the sound and it’s not for death. ‘Please, God. Please help me.’

God is slow in granting that wish.

Two more Christmases come and go. The demon grows out her hair. Steals Rid from an all night pharmacy to kill the lice. It cleans her up and as the days pass, Cosette sees reemergence of the beauty she learned to hide after her first hard year on the streets. It’s a slow blossoming at first, begins with the first bath and the hours spent picking nits from her scalp while the demon chatters to her like it’s been hungry for so long for someone to talk to. It calls itself Esther, says it used to be human in the days when man went from town to town on the backs of donkeys, and tells her that she’s beautiful time and time again as it combs her hair, short and then longer, until one day it’s down the middle of their back and the reflection in the dirty mirror glows.

It uses her name when it fucks and when it kills. A hundred men come and go, all of them passing through the demon and screaming by Cosette as the demon rides them straight into hell. Sometimes Esther takes them to places where Cosette was known as Etta, goes from bed to bed in shelters, clinics, flop houses, and places where the homeless squat and try to stay warm. It’s indiscriminate, doesn’t care if it’s feeding from the successful or the desperate so long as it fucks and it eats and it grows strong.

Fucking is for Esther what heroin was to Cosette. The demon starts to tremble and shake, makes Cosette feel the churning of bile in their gut when the need is so strong that they’re going to die from it. She hopes that they will die, hopes that God is paying attention and ready to cry ‘No more!’ It doesn’t happen. Esther finds them a man, a boy if the demon must, and it fucks itself into satiation, the soul of the victim screaming on its way out, brushing by Cosette and sometimes asking her why.

She’s sick from it, down in her soul where something pure and innocent remains, and she wonders what she’s done to deserve this. She hides when the demon slides between the sheets, some eager poor fool trembling in excitement beneath them. She never pays attention because it sickens her, torments her, and breaks her heart because the demon promises all of the love it doesn’t, can’t deliver, and the sort that Cosette has never known.

It’s late August some two years after Esther came that Cosette finds she cannot hide from everyone. This one is big, well built and strong, but they sometimes are. Esther has had them young, clean and fine before and this one might not be any different except for his eyes. His look is stern, calculating, but there’s a sadness in them that Cosette gravitates towards. It’s loss, loss so profound that it might send one out into the streets or, in his case, into the arms of something he knows wants to kill him. Cosette doesn’t know how he knows or how she can see it in his eyes while Esther is so giddy and eager that the demon is almost sick from it.

“The boy king,’’ Esther croons and stands. “And free from his keeper’s leash. Well, well, well.”

Cosette doesn’t know what the demon expects or what she herself expects and it’s a charged blur from the moment that this man, whom Esther dubs the boy king, raises his hand as if to ward the demon off or perhaps to beckon it closer.

The demon writhes in her body, chokes and shifts and bulges against her skin until Cosette is sure that she’s going to come apart. She feels it dig in, feels it hook itself around her ribs and the long bones of her legs, feels it dart sharp splinters into her brain until she can feel blood coming from her nose and pain the likes of which makes withdrawing from heroin seem like dealing with a summer cold.

After more than two years, Cosette finds her voice. “Please help me,” she begs. “Please make it go away.”

He’s shockingly compassionate in that moment and the demon gains a foothold. Cosette feels Esther toss her head as laughter, low and sultry bubbles up from their throat.

“Oh, no, Sam. I won’t go that easily. I’m no minor leaguer, boy. You’re not getting me out of her easily.”

“I am,” he tells the demon. “I am getting you out of her.”

“It’s going to take more blood than you have and do you really want to anyway?” Esther asks him and the air is electric. The demon can woo with more than the body it wears, Cosette has seen it before when it’s taken those especially strong in faith who are able to resist more men overcome with simple lust.

Sam staggers back and resists more than anyone has before him, but in the end, he succumbs like they all do. Esther is eager for him, greedy, and Cosette can feel the moistness of its lust making the satin panties they wear damp.

For several minutes there’s nothing but the shedding of clothes and the feel of flesh against flesh. Sam is strong, powerfully built and while the demon glories in his strength, Cosette wants to cry at the feel of being pressed into his embrace. There’s nothing loving in the feel of his tongue and his hands on her are as rough as any she’s experienced. But, the sadness in his eyes never leaves and the taste of him, what little she can experience around the foulness of the demon is sweet.

The blood that trickles down her nose is smeared on his face when he and Esther kiss. She expects him to react, but isn’t prepared for the way he draws back, the way he licks his lips or how frightening and calculating his gaze is as he tastes the blood and goes back down for more, even as his hand works between her legs and Cosette can feel herself and the demon filled with the firmness of his long fingers. Esther writhes as Sam licks the blood from their face with the delicate thoroughness of a cat trying to get every last drop of cream from a dish.

Something about the blood seems to strengthen Sam, seems to keep him from succumbing to Esther as she tries to get his cock from his pants and into her. Cosette will never be able to explain why she does it or how. She’s drowning, thinks she might finally be dying as Sam’s fingers work in and out of her and the demon simultaneously and even though it’s the first time she’s let herself experience any of the sex the demon has, even though it’s so good that she’s sure she’d be weeping if she had control of her own body, she finds she still struggles for one more breath, one more chance at life even though she doesn’t know why, even though she’s wanted nothing but death since the moment her mother had died with her name on her lips.

Cosette bites her tongue. The demon is too caught up in the act, too caught up in the feel of this strong, hard man, the thought of how long his life force is going to sustain it and just how good it feels. It pays no mind to the little girl who cannot break free and doesn’t even flinch with pain when Cosette bites down and draws blood, doesn’t object when she offers her mouth to Sam and he takes it. He sucks on her tongue in way that’s disgusting and obscene. Milks it until the blood slows and he’s left with nothing but the spit diluted remains that he laps up from behind her teeth, under her tongue, around and around her lips and everywhere that he can. There’s blood on his lips when he pulls back and he licks that, too.

The demon has him in hand, is stroking and pulling him so that he flinches and groans. Sam doesn’t stop working his hand, doesn’t stop the slick pressure of his fingers, but he does lean down, rests his forehead against hers, not the demon’s, not Esther, but against Cosette’s forehead even though he doesn’t know her name or have any reason to look at her with such gentle heat, with such grateful sadness. He doesn’t hold out his hand this time, just rests his brow to hers and closes his eyes as his breath hitches in his throat and something like power ripples across his flesh.

Esther’s hissing now. “No, no, no!” But she doesn’t stop stroking Sam, doesn’t try to get out from beneath him. It’s as if she’s powerless as he thrusts his hand against them, in and out and in again, is held captive by sex and impending orgasm as he rests his head against Cosette’s and pulls the demon out of her.

The demon spills out of her, from her nose and mouth, bleeding from her eyes as Sam stiffens in her hand and the feeling of flying that follows as her body clamps around his fingers is all her own.

Cosette can only lie there, shaking and weeping, shocked and confused to find that she has her body once again to herself. Sam’s hand is still between her legs, his head still pressed to hers, as he shushes her. “It’s all right now. You’ll be okay. It’s gone.”

She pulls her hand from his softening length, feels the stickiness of his spent desire, and thinks that she should sit up, find clothes, find out where she is or just do something. Instead she curls into him, wraps her arms around him and sobs like the world is broken and she’s the only one left alive to mourn its passing. Sam surprises her by holding her and by rubbing her back with slow passes of his big hand as if he’s been aching all of this time for some gentleness, too.

Cosette expects him to get up, expects him to get dressed and leave, but his fingers are trembling a little as if palsied and he does nothing but hold her until she sleeps. Her last thought is that he’ll be gone when she wakes.

*

She wakes to the sound of pounding. Cosette is hot, covered in sweat and so overly warm that she almost cannot breathe. She jumps as the boom! boom! boom! comes again on the door to the room. She cannot get herself free to see who is pounding on the door because she’s trapped beneath a tangle of limbs and the hot, sweaty press of a large body against hers. She doesn’t remember, not for a second, who she is or who has her so pinned down and she jumps again, flails as she tries to get herself free and draw a breath.

Esther. Sam. She’s free. She’s alive and she’s free. That realization and the sick blur of memory that accompanies it as the last two years speed by her causes her stomach to heave. She gags and only just manages to swallow so that she doesn’t cover her savior in vomit.

Sam hasn’t left her. He’s wrapped around her, one arm and one leg thrown over her, and Cosette is so hot because she’s been pulled up next to him, her leg between his thighs, her face pressed against his chest. He’s sweating heavily. She puts her hands to his chest and pushes away, sees a little pinch between his eyebrows as he sleeps.

The pounding on the door comes again. Sam doesn’t wake to it. She doesn’t wonder at it, just processes that he’s sleeping and decides that demon killing must be exhausting work. It falls to her to open the door, to stop the God awful pounding and this, she figures, is the least that she can do for the man who saved her life and maybe even her soul.

It takes some doing to get free from Sam. He’s so much larger than she is and instinct has him drawing her closer in his sleep as she tries to get out from beneath his arm and his leg. It’s strangely automatic to whisper nonsense to him, to croon as the expression on his face turns to something like pain, something like sorrow bordering on agony. Cosette’s never been gentle to anyone. She’s never had the chance and she wonders where the response comes from. Sam quiets and grows limp. His hold on her slackens and she’s able to pull free from him. She sits up, finds a discarded shirt on the floor, his, and bends down to retrieve it.

It’s huge on her, a soft, well worn flannel that comes half way down her thighs when she puts it on and hurriedly does up a couple of the buttons on the way to the door. The room is small, an old, disreputable motel room. The part of her that has lived on the streets in the time before Esther is amazed at it. Takes in the bed, the bathroom, the mirror and the table, chairs, working lights and television and thinks it’s heaven. But part of her remembers what a home is like, remembers clean sheets and walls done up in French blue with candles, bric-a-brac, and a painting of Parisian café done years ago by the man who loved her mother over one forgotten summer and had been her father. That part of her knows what a dive this is, what a shithole, and wrinkles her fine nose at the smell of sex that had probably permeated this room long before the demon had taken up residence.

Cosette steps over Sam’s big shoes and her own, tiny stylish boots that Esther had gotten God knows where, and goes to the door. There’s no chain and she has no choice but to open the door fully. There’s a man outside in jeans and a stained undershirt, the sort that comes with the reek of cigar smoke and a worn medallion with one saint or another stamped upon it.

He looks her up and down like she’s stepped off a runway instead of rolled out of bed, Sam’s come dried on her hand and her arm, and still sweaty and disheveled from sleep. He doesn’t even try to hide the want in his face when he looks at her. Cosette draws the edges of Sam’s shirt more tightly around her and does up another button even though she’s not wearing any panties and it’s probably a wasted effort.

“Wanted me to watch out for you,” the man tells her and when Cosette looks at him in blank confusion, he continues. “Paid me to keep an eye on things,” he clarifies.

It’s the Etta part of her that comes forward to answer, that takes in the look in his eyes and knows that this could go badly in seconds flat. There haven’t been too many times that she was laid flat and taken against her will in the days before Esther, but they happened and Etta was the result of it. It’s not a second personality, not the result of any kind of psychotic break, it’s just a shield, a cloak that Cosette learned to draw around herself to help keep her safe.

“Yeah, you were paid. What of it?” She snaps at him, draws herself up like she’s not five foot nothing and half naked with the musky cologne of spent sex clinging to her.

He’s unmoved by her display, but doesn’t seem like he’s going to rush at her either. When he flicks a glance to Sam still naked in bed, Cosette half wonders if the sheer size of him is part of the reason why. He looks back at her and smiles. His teeth are the color of old tea. “Cops,” he says finally. “Outside and they comin’ in. Don’t know if they lookin’ for you, but they comin’ and you paid me to keep an eye on things.”

Cosette nods, panic rising high and fluttering in her throat. She shuts the door in his face and turns to the room, beset with the urge to flee. She hasn’t done anything. She believes this, but doesn’t bother to think to wait calmly for the police who probably aren’t even looking for her. She spent enough time on the streets to view cops as an intrinsically bad thing. They are the cause of lost blankets, lost heroin, lost warm places to sleep. Sometimes through nothing but good intentions and sometimes through entirely bad desires, either way, cops mean something uncomfortable and painful always, always follows.

She has to go and she has to go now.

Cosette finds the little bag that Esther carried. It’s next to a smart, leather travel bag that looks to cost enough to keep her in drugs for months. There’s clothes inside, the soft slippery feel of silk. Stockings and another pair of expensive shoes. She starts stuffing whatever she finds inside – Sam’s cell phone, a lacy bra the color of old linen, a bottle of perfume that smells like raindrops and hyacinth.

She has Sam’s underwear in her hand when she realizes that she’s packing up as if she means to leave him. Cosette doesn’t understand how he can still be asleep when there’s police coming and they have to run, but he is, hasn’t yet moved, and though the unsettled jerking in her belly tells her to run, the twist in her heart forces her to go to the bed and shake him by the shoulder.

“Sam. Wake up, Sam. Wake up!” It’s weird to say it like he’s an errant teenager who won’t get out of bed, weird to be calling him by name as if she’s known him for weeks and months and years, but it comes easily to her, just as soothing him had.

Sam wakes and Cosette is instantly afraid of him. He grabs her before his eyes even focus and flips her down on the bed, one large hand squeezing her neck. Cosette can only gasp and stare up at him, terrified as he holds her down, pins her beneath his body and glares at her fiercely.

She doesn’t know what to tell him, doesn’t know how to explain that there’d been a demon inside of her and he’d killed it or made it go away, doesn’t know if he even remembers or cares. He could kill her with one easy twitch of his powerful fingers, the same ones that had pulled an orgasm out of her body just a few hours ago. She can still smell the tang of herself on him.

“C-cops,” she gasps, not knowing what else to say. “Outside. The man, he said, he said they’re coming in.”

For a moment she isn’t sure that Sam’s going to do anything other than snap her neck. She can only stare up at him like a trapped, terrified rabbit and wait to see what he’ll do. With his hand on her windpipe, she’s suddenly aware of her throat, how raw it feels from crying and how swollen, thick, and painful her tongue feels in her mouth. She pushes it against her palate, feels a throb of agony across the middle of it and wonders how it is that she doesn’t need stitches, thinks she probably does. Copper fills her mouth as her tongue bleeds and Cosette swallows it down.

Sam lets go of her. The pupils of his eyes constrict as he finally focuses and she wonders that it took so long, wonders if he’s sick or if killing the demon has done something to him because he seems so slow to come around. The notion is quickly pushed aside when he rolls off of her and fumbles on the floor for his clothes.

She’s still holding his underwear and hands them to him silently as she stands. She moves around him shyly, cautiously because his size is more apparent than ever and she realizes that he’s easily capable of doing her serious harm with a minimal amount of effort. She should have left him. He saved her, she’s grateful, but, even with nowhere to go and no thought about what she should do now after so long away from the world and control of her own body, instinct says she should have left him. It’s strange, then, that fear is what keeps her there, what has her helping him find shoes and socks and the t-shirt he was wearing beneath his flannel.

Cosette looks at it, realizes that she’s stuffed the clothes she’d had with her in a bag, and starts to undo the buttons, meaning to hand it to him.

“No,” Sam tells her, “it’s all right. We don’t have time. We’ll sort things out later. If the police are coming, we should just go.”

She nods and zips up her bag, slinging it and the purse over her shoulder. Sam takes a frustrating moment to bend down and retrieve something beneath the bed and she’d chastise him for it were it not for the way that he clasps the necklace he finds. He palms it like she’s seen people do with rosaries and crucifixes, cradles it in his huge fist like it’s precious and she unconsciously reaches for the locket that Esther had thankfully never once removed while in possession of her body. She understands how small things can be more than treasured, believes that such things are holy in a way that only someone who has lost something vital can really understand.

Cosette is wondering who or what Sam lost when he slips the necklace – a faded gold amulet on a black cord – around his neck. 

He’s still sweating, still looks a little feverish and sick, but Sam takes her hand as they head to the door without hesitation. He’s a born leader, she realizes, used to taking charge and pulling people beneath his wing without thought. He pulls her along now as he opens the door and scans the hallway in both directions before proceeding away from the stairs.

The police aren’t on the floor, not yet, though she can hear the commotion from floors below them as doors are knocked on and voices begin to rise in protest. This isn’t the kind of place that welcomes the law, it’s the kind that views such intrusions as a raid and she wonders if there are other people, like them, trying to make their escape unnoticed.

Sam takes her to the window at the end of the hall. There’s a fire escape on the other side of it. He opens the window and straddles the sill, one leg on the metal landing of the fire escape, the other reaching to the floor of the hallway. He looks down and frowns. Cosette sticks her head through the window to see what has him so displeased. There are others on the escape, noisily making their way to the street. If the police haven’t already thought to go around to the back, they soon will. Sam looks up and seems to make a decision. He gets out onto the landing and takes her hand again, pulling her with him. She leans to head towards the steep metal stairs leading down, but Sam takes her by the elbow and gently pushes her in front of him, urging her to climb up.

“But…”

“Trust me,” he says. It’s not a plea, is nothing short of a command, and with no other ideas or avenues of escape, she has to trust him. She starts to climb and continues until she reaches the last platform. There’s a rusted and worn looking ladder hooked to the roof.

“Keep climbing,” Sam tells her. “We’re going to the roof.”

“But, then where?” Cosette asks.

“To the car,” he says like that makes any kind of sense.

Cosette’s instinct is yammering in dislike, is pitching a fit in all of its Etta glory, telling her that this is just foolhardy and dumb. But, she climbs because there’s nowhere else to go.

“Hurry,” Sam tells her and reaches up to push on her backside like he can physically propel her up any faster.

Cosette climbs faster, feet slipping on the rungs in her stupid, shiny boots and she all but flips over the last rung. She lands face first in a near belly flop to the concrete, tastes more blood in her mouth, and starts to push herself up on her palms when Sam lands next to her, quick and graceful despite his size. He pushes her down and holds a finger to his lips.

She hears a commotion below, hears the sound of boots on the fire escape and yelling below.

“Get down! Right now! Down, down, down! All the way down!”

“Cops found the fire escape,” Sam whispers.

“What now? We hide?”

Sam shakes his head. “Told you, we’re going to the car.”

 _Well, it’s not fucking parked up here,_ is what she wants to say, but she just stares at him and contemplates the fact that he might just be a little bit crazy.

Sam doesn’t do anything to dispel this notion as he pulls her up to a half crouch and leads her across the roof to the ledge on the side. He stands then, scans the drop off and the building next to it and nods.

“No way,” Cosette says, shaking her head. “This isn’t some movie. I can’t do that. I can’t.”

“You can,” Sam tells her and takes her purse and her bag from her shoulder. He tosses them over before she can protest and gets up on the ledge, pulling her with him. She teeters, rocks on the heels of her boots and looks down. Seven stories has never, ever, seemed so high.

“No.”

“It’s not far,” he tells her. “Look, I’ll show you.”

Cosette doesn’t get a chance to protest before Sam leaps, he just leaps like jumping from one building to another is something he does every day. He lands on his feet, doesn’t even wobble or fall. He turns and beckons her to him.

“Come on,” he says, his voice carrying easily to her, though it’s a half-whisper.

Cosette shakes her head and looks behind her. There’s a door on the roof, one leading back down into the shitty motel they’ve just quit and she thinks maybe she can hide, thinks maybe she can just wait for the cops who probably aren’t here for her and will surely just let her go. On the other side of the building and far down below on the ground, she can still hear the yelling of police.

“What’s your name?” Sam asks her.

She turns back to him, holding her arms out a little like she’s balancing on a tightrope and gapes at him. “W-what?”

“What’s your name?” he asks and it’s like they’ve got all of the time in the world even though she knows that they don’t, even though she knows that he’ll leave her if she doesn’t somehow get herself across the gap to him.

She nearly says that her name is Etta, but surprises herself by answering him truthfully. “Cosette. My name… my name’s Cosette.”

“Cosette, look at me,” he tells her and she does. She stops looking down and looks him in the eye. “You can do this. You survived what most people don’t and I know you can do this.”

“But why?” she asks. “Why do I have to?”

“Because when you heard cops were coming, you wanted to run and you still want to run. You don’t want to be around when they get here and I understand that. I don’t either. So, you have to jump, Cosette. It’s not far and I promise, I swear to God that I won’t let you fall.”

She believes him. There’s no reason to other than that fact that he pulled a demon out of her, but it’s a pretty big reason to believe him, to trust him even though this whole thing is too crazy for her. But, it’s also just too high and, like she’d said, she’s not in a movie. She believes he’d catch her, but she doesn’t believe in his assessment of her. She can’t do it. She’s too afraid.

Which is why, when he glances over his shoulder, his very posture indicating that he’s going to leave her, to the cops, to her life – whatever that’s supposed to be now – she doesn’t at all understand why she sucks in a breath and jumps to him.

There’s a sickening, but almost euphoric sense of weightlessness for a fraction of a second. She wonders if this is how a bird feels in the sky and thinks that maybe she’d like to feel this way forever, but then gravity resumes its inexorable hold and starts pulling her to the pavement far below. Cosette utters a tiny squeak, nothing more than a shocked sound of utmost terror and she’ s certain that she’s going to die, certain that she’s lived all of this time on the streets and survived a possession only to splatter to the ground.

She collides with Sam and he pulls her with strong, certain arms away from the ledge, away from the fall.

“Oh, fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck!” she breathes and she’s clinging to him, breathing into his chest and refusing for several seconds to let go.

Sam huffs a small, pleased sound against her hair and pats her on the back. “That was amazing.”

“That was horrible!” she protests.

“Yeah,” he agrees, “but still amazing.”

Cosette doesn’t think so.

Sam gives her a small smile, it’s tight and weary, but genuine enough. He palms the greasy looking sweat from his brow and she wonders again if he’s sick when he takes her hand. “Come on.”

They find the roof access door and stick with the stairs. Though they pass a few of the residents of the building and Sam actually stops to lift an old woman’s shopping basket up a few steps for her, earning him a brilliant smile, they reach the ground level without being harassed. He ducks his head into the lobby of the building that’s only a few degrees less shabby than the one they recently quit and pulls her through the door.

The police are outside and a few residents are gathered in the lobby, watching them and speculating with cops of coffee and their newspapers.

“What do we do?” Cosette asks him.

Sam considers for a moment and then pulls her into an alcove a few feet from the front door. “Walk out,” he tells her. She opens her mouth to protest because, really, if the police are looking for either one of them, how can they possibly just stroll by, but Sam doesn’t give her the chance. He takes her purse from her shoulder and rifles through it, coming up with an expensive pair of sunglasses that Cosette has no memory of ever owning. Like so much of what she carries, she knows they were the possession of the demon that inhabited her body for so long.

Sam puts the sunglasses on her face and then considers her appearance for a small moment. She doesn’t know what he’s looking at and startles when he takes the ends of the too large shirt that she’s wearing and ties it in a knot around her hips. He spins her before she can question and runs his fingers through her hair. Before she can say anything or even take a moment to enjoy the strange gentleness of the act, he’s pulling her hair back and looping it into a pony tail without a rubber band.  

“Got any lipstick?” he asks as he studies her again.

Cosette looks at him helplessly and digs through her purse, thinking that he’s the strangest man she’s ever met. Considering that she’s spent half of her life stoned out of her mind on the streets and two years possessed by a demon, she figures it must be saying something. She smoothes a high shine gloss over her lips and Sam nods in approval.

“Look bored and a little pissy. I’m going to go first and distract the cops. You come out a few seconds later. Don’t stop, don’t look around, look like you can’t be bothered to care what’s going on. Down the block to the right and around the corner is a black Impala…”

“A what?”

“Big, black car,” Sam amends. “Doors will be unlocked. Get in and wait for me.”

“And if they’re looking for you and not me?” she asks.

“Then expect me to come running,” Sam replies like it’s no big deal to walk into a cluster of cops that could be looking for him, like such bold, brazen stupidity is something normal to him.

He gives her a reassuring grin and hands her the heavier bags before heading towards the doors of the apartment building. It’s strange how he changes. He’s so big, so powerfully built and Cosette can’t help but equate him with the man capable of defeating a demon, but when he strides easily up to the police he seems friendly. Affable and curious, nothing but a pleasant young man eager to find out what all of the excitement is about. The two cops at the door turn to him and after a second of bored disinterest, they relax. Smile, hand Sam a piece of paper and start chatting like they’ve known him forever or maybe wouldn’t mind hanging out with him.

Cosette watches him for a moment and then does as she was instructed. She opens the door and strides through it like she’s seen people do in the city. Busy, joyless, and utterly above everyone around her. She doesn’t break stride when she passes a young boy at the corner sitting playing the harmonica next to a used coffee cup with a smattering of change inside. He looks up at her hopefully as he plays and Cosette walks by without acknowledging him, treating him as if he’s invisible to her. It hurts in a way she doesn’t expect because she’s been that person not long ago – begging for change, hoping to God that there might be enough at the end of the day for something to eat. But that was before the heroin, before the demon, and before the cops.

She turns the corner and finds the car.

It’s gleaming and immaculate. She puts the bags in the backseat and after a moment of debate where she wonders if she should hide or sit in the front like she belongs there, she gets in the front passenger side. The seat is pushed all of the way back and she’s glad that she doesn’t know how to drive. Her feet would never reach the pedals.

The car is devoid of any details about Sam, other than an iPod adapter shoved into the tape deck. Nothing hangs from the rearview mirror, there are no receipts on the floor, no leftover takeout bags or cups. The car is almost distressingly tidy. It makes her wonder if Sam isn’t going to turn out to be some kind of controlling neat-freak.

Cosette starts to get fidgety. Time moves strangely when adrenaline is running high. She knows this from far too much personal experience and she’s sure that it’s not really ten minutes that have passed. Probably only five, but does it take five minutes to distract the police? What if they had been looking for Sam? What if someone saw him with her? She glances in the side mirror and thinks that if she sees the first flash of blue uniform that she’ll get out of the car and run. It’s been six minutes at least. Easily six minutes. Sam’s not coming. Sam’s been taken by the police. Sam’s probably right now telling the cops everything he knows about Cosette because he’s running from the cops too and it’d be smarter to hand her over than to get himself into any hot water.

She has her hand on the door, certain that it’s been more than six minutes, maybe it’s been ten after all, and she’s just about ready to get out of the car and run until she can find some place to hole up and hide when Sam rounds the corner at the end of the block.

He’s walking casually like he’s in no rush and has no particular place to be.

Sam strolls to the car. There is no other word for it. He’s the perfect image of a carefree young man and she wonders how he does it, how he’s not panicked and desperate to flee. It makes him seem suddenly more dangerous than when he’d had her by the throat earlier. Cosette wonders if it wouldn’t still be smart to get out of the car and run, but the tender, sad expression on his face when he’d held her last night comes back to her. She trusts him. The Etta part of her thinks that she’s a stupid, stupid girl, but she ignores that caustic judgment and waits for him.

Sam gets into the car and hands her a piece of paper. “I think we should get out of the city,” he says as he fishes a set of keys from his pocket and starts the car. It comes to life with a low, throaty rumble that says it means business.

She looks at what he’s handed her and sees her own face, smiling not her smile, but Esther’s. She’s wearing a slinky black dress and staring seductively into the camera as if she knows that it’s there and just doesn’t even care. The top of the paper reads “Wanted for Questioning.”

She swallows hard. Thinks about the city where she’s spent most of her life and the safe little suburbs on the outer edge where her house used to be. There’s nothing for her here and staying suddenly seems like a very bad idea.

“Yeah,” Cosette tells him. “That’s smart.”

He nods and takes a second to connect the suspected iPod to the adapter. The music that plays is light and friendly, hippy-dippy Indie stuff as Austin might have called it. Sam looks at her for a second with an almost chagrined expression and it takes her a moment to realize that he’s waiting for her to disagree with his choice of music.

Cosette doesn’t understand, just shrugs. “Music’s nice. And, uh, it’s your car, so, driver picks the music and all, right?”

Sam looks like he’s just been slapped.

Cosette wakes with the off-colored glow of sodium vapor lights shining down on her. She’s pressed up against the window, neck kinked terribly, and for several long, panicked moments she doesn’t know where she is, isn’t sure who she is. Her life and the sleeping nightmare of the last two years seeps in slowly as she sits up, takes in the emptiness of the car.

 _Sam,_ she thinks.

She gets out the car and is impressed by how stiff she feels. For so long, she hasn’t felt physical discomfort. No aches, no weariness, no hunger or even the urge to pee. She feels it all now, feels simultaneously ancient, used up and more alive than she thinks she’s ever been.

Sam.He’s brought her back to life and she thinks that she should find him, thinks that she should go to the bathroom and maybe scrounge in the demon’s purse to see if there’s change enough for a coffee and something to eat.

The stars distract her.

Cosette walks away from where the car is parked – hulking, shining, and mean as hell – next to a gas pump. She reaches the edge of the parking lot and steps out onto the side of the road. She looks up and feels her mouth part slightly.

There are so many stars. More than she’d thought possible. She knows it’s nothing magical. Just the night sky without the constant light pollution of the city she’s lived her entire life in, but when she looks up and finds them strung in glittering infinity across the purple-black expanse of the sky, it’s like the universe is spread out before her. Nothing has seemed beautiful to her in a very long time. Nothing has made her feel like life is actually full of hope and possibility quite like this. It’s astonishing and a little overwhelming.

She doesn’t turn when she hears footsteps.

“There’s so many,” she breathes, doesn’t even know if it’s Sam behind her or not until he’s huge and warm just next to her.

“Yeah. Guess you don’t see so many in the city.”

“No,” she replies. “I feel… I feel…”

“Alive,” he answers for her and she turns to him finally and smiles. She thinks it’s the first time she’s smiled in years.

“Alive,” she agrees. When she spies the coffee in his hand, she wants to attack him and take it, even if she’d have about as much success as a mouse taking on a panther.

Sam turns away from the heavens and hands her the cup with a small smile tugging at the corners of his mouth. “Didn’t know how you liked it, but there’s cream and sugar in the bag.”

“Bag?”

“In the car with some sandwiches and donuts.”

Cosette salivates immediately. “You’re really good at this whole savior thing.”

Sam rolls his eyes and nudges her back to the parking lot. “I’m not anyone’s savior, Cosette. Just helping out where I can. We have a ways to go. So if you need to use the bathroom…”

The urge to go comes back immediately and Cosette hands him the cup before heading towards the small shop almost at a run. She stops beneath the awning overhead where seemingly a hundred different types of insects are busy throwing themselves at the lights.

“What’s it make you feel?” she asks.

“What?”

“The stars,” she clarifies.

Sam sets both coffee cups down on the roof of the car and doesn’t look back towards the sky. He rubs sweat from his brow and looks tired, looks like maybe he’d just puked not that long ago. She doesn’t think that he’s going to answer and she’s started back towards the convenience store when she hears Sam speak, very quietly.

“Alone.”

*

They’ve been back on the road for about an hour, Sam driving with his coffee cup wedged between his thighs like it’s second nature, when he makes a small noise and pulls the car over to the shoulder of the darkened highway.

He’s out the car in an instant, his coffee spilling to the floorboards and the look on his face is so distressed that Cosette reaches for him. Sam goes down on his knees next to the car, looks as though he’s about to have a fit from the spilled coffee and she wants to ask him what’s wrong, but he goes pale and waxy.

Sam lurches away from the car. Before Cosette can even get out, he’s bent over in the tall grass on the roadside. She can hear him groan as he heaves and he is, as she thought earlier, more than a little sick. She gets out the car and goes to him hesitantly, uncertain why the urge to comfort him seems so natural.

Cosette reaches for him, puts a hand on his broad, shaking back and pats him uncertainly as he vomits up everything he’s had in the past several hours.

“S’all right,” he gasps. Sam wipes at his mouth with the back of his hand, but bends over again, puking the last, ropey strings of bile. He heaves fruitlessly for several minutes afterwards.

“You’re sick,” Cosette says and feels a little stupid for stating the obvious.

“Flu or something,” Sam gets out. “Just what I need right now.”

“What can I do?”

“Nothing.” And perhaps thinking that he sounded harsh, he clutches her hand for a second to give it a grateful little squeeze. “It’s okay. Just… just need a minute.”

“Maybe we should rest for a while. You could sleep in the backseat or…”

“No.” Sam stands. He wavers for a second, but pushes everything down like it’s something he’s been taught to do. Though he’s washed out, pale as a ghost in the moonlight and glistening with an unhealthy sweat, he looks determined, strong even like he’s ready to do battle. Like he’s certain that there’s a battle around the corner that might require him.

“Better that we keep going. It’s just a couple more hours and I’ll feel more secure there.”

It’s a strange thing to say. Cosette supposes that’s how most people feel about home, but no one articulates it that way. Home is cozy. Home is comfortable. Home is even safe, but secure? It’s been a long time since she’s had a home, had safety and, yes, maybe even security, but it still sounds strange to her and sends an unwelcome little thrill up her spine.

 _Demons_ , she tells herself. _This is a man who fights demons. It’s probably a lot more normal in his world than you think._

“Okay,” Cosette replies. “If you think it’s best.” 

She goes back to the car and finds a bottle of water in the bag of sandwiches that Sam hasn’t touched. The side of it is glazed with the sticky sweetness of the donuts Cosette had devoured and she wipes it on the tail of the shirt she’s wearing before handing it to him.

She leaves him to rinse out his mouth and, remembering his distress over the spilled coffee in his otherwise immaculate car, she goes through the large duffle in the backseat looking for a towel. She finds two heavy, shining guns that make her fingers tremble and, incongruously, a large canister of table salt. There’s a towel, though, and she takes it out, quickly zipping up the bag and hiding the salt and weaponry from view.

Cosette is mopping up the last of the coffee that’s splashed back under the seat when Sam comes up behind her. She turns and looks at him over her shoulder. His face is unreadable.

“Thank you.”

“The car’s so clean,” she says, feeling like she should somehow apologize for doing anything to his car, even if it was to help him. “Seemed… I don’t know. Seemed to upset you.”

“It’s my brother’s car,” Sam says. His face is still blank, but his voice is tight like he’s still shoving everything down, like there’s a drill sergeant behind him telling him to keep it together. “I promised to take good care of it.”

“Is he away?” She wonders if he’s overseas, wonders where he could be that Sam seems so in pain over worry for him, even if he tries to hide it.

“Yes.” Sam’s voice is still flat. “Far away.”

“Well,” she stands, holding the coffee soaked towel awkwardly. “Well. He’ll be amazed when he comes back because the car looks like it’s in great shape.”

“Something’s knocking,” Sam tells her and though he’s looking at her, she doesn’t think he sees her at all. “Beneath the hood. Probably a loose cap or something. Gotta check that out. Gotta take care of that.”

She’s almost afraid that he means to do it now, that after driving for half the day and puking on the side of the road, Sam means to get beneath the hood and start taking things apart. He shouldn’t. He needs to lie down and because she’s sure that she’s not going to get him to rest until he’s home, she steps a little closer to him. She reaches up and touches his cheek. Her hand is damp with cold coffee and Sam’s face feels too warm, but he smiles slightly and leans into her the tiniest little bit like he’s starved for affection.

“Tomorrow,” Cosette tells him. “You can look at it tomorrow after you get some rest. Not gonna do a bang up job of it all sweaty and sick in the dark anyhow, right?”

Sam seems to focus and snap back from wherever he’d been. He nods.

Cosette gives his cheek one last pat that seems to embarrass him this time and then goes back to her side of the car. She gets in as Sam’s starting it up. The gentle strumming of some man’s guitar fills the air and she leans back in the seat, thinking about Sam and how strange he is, how strange all of this is. She wonders if any of it will make more sense when they reach Sam’s home.

*

Whatever Cosette was expecting when Sam finally parks the car and says “we’re here,” it wasn’t this. She tries to think that maybe it’s a family home long gone into ruin that Sam can’t stand to part with, but there’s too much a sense of disuse. The door and the windows are papered with signs that read “condemned.”

It’s a little bit of a shock, but she thinks that maybe Sam’s squatting. It’s not an unfamiliar arrangement or a bad idea. Old houses in quiet, nearly empty neighborhoods like the one they’re in make for excellent places to stay dry. In the city, cops had come routinely to shake up the old homes, clearing out the homeless inside like they were rinsing fleas from a dog. But this place, this town is too small, so small that it seems almost alien to her. She doesn’t think that there’s much in the way of a town, let alone a police force – which probably suits Sam just fine. It’s unlikely that anyone’s going to come to run them off. It’s a perfect place, really, and the part of her that goes by Etta actually approves, but it’s Cosette that frowns as she stares up at it, shouldering her bags while Sam opens the trunk.

He doesn’t look like the sort of guy that needs to squat in an abandoned building. He’s too clean and while he’s clearly not rolling in the cash, he’s not destitute either. He’s too casual with his money, not counting to make sure he has enough when buying food or gas, just operating with the ease of one that knows there’s enough there. He should have a home. People like him always do. It’s a little unsettling to stand before the sort of place she might have been delighted to find not so long ago and know that this is where Sam feels safe, where he feels secure.

She comes around the back of the car just as Sam’s opening the trunk. He pulls out another bag to go with his duffle, a well worn leather computer bag. He takes it and slings it over his shoulder and then pauses, looking at her with tired sheepishness.

“Don’t freak out, okay?”

In Cosette’s experience, the people who make that request are generally of the belief that they’re about to do something that they themselves believe warrants freaking out. She steels herself and waits for it.

Sam opens the bottom of the trunk, the kind of thing that rises up to reveal spare tires and jacks, stuff like that. Inside is anything but and she feels her jaw drop. He’s right. It’s something to freak out about. He has an arsenal. More guns, knives, bullets, and jars of God knows what than she can really process.

“Holy crap,” she breathes. “Are you going to war?”

He unclips a shotgun, opens it to check if it’s loaded, and snaps it closed with one hand while shutting the trunk with the other. “Well, you could say I kinda am at war, I guess.”

“Demons?”

He nods. “Among other things.”

“What other things?” she squeaks.

“Probably just about every nightmare you can think of. It’s all right. We’re safe here.”

 _If it’s safe_ , she wonders, _why do you have a shotgun? And how can this be all right?_

Cosette follows Sam up the rickety steps, avoids the holes on the porch where ambitious, thick weeds have burst through and stops behind him as he opens the door and leads the way inside with the shotgun at the ready.

“I thought you said we were safe?”

“Precaution,” Sam answers. “Never know who or what might have found a way in.”

She thinks that there are probably a hundred different ways into the tired, old house. Hell, if someone really wanted in, she’s betting they could probably just start pulling at the old clapboard shingled siding. But, she lets Sam have his precautionary measures without comment and goes inside.

It’s a bigger house than it had looked from the outside, old with the sort of high ceilings people have since learned make a place hard to heat. Vines have worked their way inside from every available opening, of which there are several, and the entire house is steaming, but sweet with honeysuckle.

They pass over the sort of marks on the floor that makes her think of Satanic cults and virgin sacrifices. When she looks up, she sees something similar spray painted on the ceiling and can’t fathom what sort of patience it must have taken to get it up there.

All of the windows and doors are lined with powdery grains and she’s remembering the salt canister in his duffle bag even before she sticks a finger into one. Sam smoothes over the break she makes in the salt, restoring the line, and closes the front door.

He leads her through the empty front room to what must have been a study in previous years. The built in shelves hold an assortment of things she assumes to belong to Sam – jugs of water with little strings of beads pooled at the bottom, oil lamps, flashlights, a few leather tomes, but no weaponry. No more shotguns or pistols. No bullets or shells.

That, she figures, he must take with him.

Cosette drops her bags on the only cot in the room and leans in to the nearest shelf to investigate the water. The beads in the bottom make up a rosary.

“Who _are_ you?”

Sam snorts a little. “Got a couple of hours?”

“I kinda do, actually,” Cosette replies and sits down on the cot.

He opens his mouth like he doesn’t really know what to say to that, like he really hadn’t planned on having this discussion. He just shakes his head instead and sets his on things down on a table made out of an old door balanced on cement blocks. He takes a moment to light a hurricane lantern and it casts the room in a warm glow that’s not entirely unpleasing.

“I’m Sam,” he tells her as he turns the wick on the lantern down low. “And I try to help people, like you, who are up against the sort of things that aren’t supposed to be real.”

“And?” she prompts.

“And…” he blows out a sigh. “I really want to lie down.”

She doesn’t think that he normally makes excuses, but he still looks wan and sort of green, so she doesn’t push him. Just gets up from the cot and moves her things, gesturing for Sam to take her place. “I’ll settle in on the couch,” she says.

“I think there might be a family of field mice living in it,” he warns her.

“Field mice,” she says with a dismissive wave of her hand. “Tell me rats are in there and I might be concerned.”

They stare at one another for a long moment. “Why isn’t this weird for you?” Sam asks her.

Cosette laughs. “I was thinking the same thing earlier. I guess the answer’s ‘demons,’ maybe. I… I don’t know, Sam. I haven’t even been in control of my body for two years and before that…” She rubs the inside of her arms self-consciously, wonders if she looks if the track marks will be as stark and as obvious as the last time she’d studied them. “I was on the streets for a long time. This, all of this,” she says gesturing to the salt on the windowsill behind him and the shotgun he’s laid on the table, “it’s just a different chapter of the same long nightmare, I guess.  Maybe someday I’ll wake up and find something real.”

When he answers her, Sam sounds like he’s channeling someone else entirely. “Trust me, sweetheart, this is as real as it gets.”

Cosette wonders what Sam names that part of himself. Wonders, if like Etta, it’s the voice of his survival instinct. She doesn’t think so, not really. She thinks maybe it’s the part of him that steps up and helps him cope.

*

Sam doesn’t sleep easily and Cosette can’t sleep at all. She tosses and turns on the couch, punches the spring poking into her butt until something squeaks beneath her and she hears the scrabbling of tiny claws. She gets up in the end, wanders the house in the dark, risking the creaking stairs to investigate the upper level. She finds bedrooms with water stained wallpaper, a linen cupboard with bits of twigs and fluff like a bird had once made a cozy home inside, and a bathroom with a hole in the ceiling that goes straight through the attic. She can still see the stars peering down at her.

Back downstairs she finds the kitchen utterly devoid of appliances, though she can still see the vague outline of where a stove and a refrigerator once might have been. Enough moonlight filters through the gaps in the boarded up windows that she can see and she opens each of the cupboards in turn, not really hungry, just bored enough to investigate. Shelf paper curls in from the corners and she spies a few crunchy looking cockroaches belly up.

She tries the faucet on the kitchen sink and turns it off immediately when a deep clanking starts up somewhere in the bowels of the house. Cosette bites her lip and turns to look into the other room. She can just barely see Sam’s feet. Either the noise didn’t wake him or didn’t concern him. She lets out a breath, grateful because he’d looked so tired.

Careful of Sam’s salt lines, which she thinks she might ask about in the morning, she opens the backdoor. The backyard is a jungle. Cosette is so used to the city, so used to plant and flower and weed being hemmed in and contained by cement and brick that she finds it enchanting.

Fireflies skip over the tall weeds and the smell of honeysuckle, so thick in the warmth of the house, now competes with wild roses, thick insistent vines of wisteria climbing over a ruined fence and a clothes line, and an almost overwhelming scent that she can only name as green. Trees tower over the yard, their leaves whispering in the faint, hot August breeze and Cosette thinks maybe she’d like to stay here forever. She doesn’t think it’ll be so magical seeming under the full burn of the summer sun, but now with the crickets steadily trying to drown out the soothing buzz and drone of cicadas, she thinks it’s the most peaceful place that she’s ever been.

It really does seem like a dream and she has a disorienting sense of slipping outside of her body and looking at herself, at her life. It’s like all of this is happening to someone else and while that used to be just the sort of feeling she craved when getting high, it sets her to trembling now. She’s had this feeling before, for two years while the demon chattered at her and fucked and killed. She doesn’t want it now, doesn’t ever want to feel it again, no matter how peaceful the night, how beautiful.

Cosette has to be in control, she needs to be in control, and so thinking, she starts to panic, starts to wonder if maybe the demon’s oily black smoke had found its way back into her when she wasn’t paying attention. 

 _Sam_ , she thinks. _Sam will know_. She turns her back on the riotous, overgrown back yard and goes back inside, stepping over the salt line like it’s already habit.

Panic causes her to run to the old study where they’ve camped out. She reaches Sam and thinks he’s awake for a moment when he speaks.

“Dean. Please, Dean. Please.”

“Sam?”

He doesn’t answer, doesn’t open his eyes or turn his head, just frowns terribly, sweat running down his brow to mingle with what Cosette is horrified to realize are tears. She doesn’t know what it is about him that makes her feel so damned maternal, so weirdly protective, but something twists awfully in her chest in the face of his torment. She sits on the edge of the metal cot that doesn’t look so different from the sort of beds she used to find in women’s shelters and missions.

“Sam,” she says again and touches his forehead. She expected him to be warm, but he feels like he’s burning from the inside out and she knows a very real moment of panic when she realizes that he might be more than just a little bit sick.

“What do I do?” she asks him. “Sam, wake up and tell me what I should do.”

He turns his head, again seeking her touch like no one’s touched him tenderly recently and, after a moment, he blinks open his eyes. They’re glazed over, gray and brown in the low light from the lantern.

“Sam, I’m worried.”

“Oh, God,” Sam says and reaches up to touch her cheek with his fingertips. It’s hesitant at first, like he expects her to vanish. When he finds her real, the touch is more certain. He touches her hair, her lips, and he’s so gentle, his look so tender, hungry, and sad, that Cosette is sure that her heart is breaking in her chest.

“Jess.”

She closes her eyes, aching, reeling, and terrified all at once. He’s not seeing her. She doesn’t know who the girl is that he sees, but it’s obvious that she’s someone very dear. “Sam,” she says forlornly. “It’s Cosette. Remember? You… you saved me.”

“I wanted to,” he tells her, tears still spilling from the elegant, sharp corners of his eyes. “God, Jess, I wanted to save you.”

She thinks she’s going to cry too, and though it feels like a little bit of a horrible trick she’s playing on him, when Sam opens his arms and whispers “c’mere, baby, oh God, just c’mere,” she goes.

She doesn’t hesitate when he kisses her, doesn’t flinch when he undresses her for the second time in less than twenty-four hours, and though he’s feverish and delusional, though he gasps someone else’s name when he bodily lifts her onto his cock, it’s still the sweetest, most desperately sad thing she’s ever known.

“Jess,” Sam groans as she starts to move.

“Shh,” Cosette replies, sobbing a little. “Shh, Sam. I’m here. It’s okay, I’m here.”

*

Someone’s stroking the inside of her arm with slow, investigative passes. Cosette opens her eyes and finds herself on the bare floor, Sam on his side next to her. He frowns as his fingers trail over the track marks which, when she looks, are much finer than she thought ever possible, but still plenty evident. She pulls her arm away and sits up. She’s naked. They both are.

“Drugs?” Sam asks, like he’s more concerned about the scars life’s left on her than anything else.

“Yeah. Heroin,” she breathes and looks at him. He seems clear, seems to know where he is, who she is, but there are dark shadows beneath his eyes and he still looks pale in the morning sunlight. “How are you feeling?”

“So-so,” he answers. He looks again at her arms. “What happened?”

Cosette doesn’t want to answer the question, doesn’t want to get into her own pathetic drama, so she stands, ignoring how his eyes linger over her as she finds the shirt she’d had on yesterday. It smells only marginally better than she herself does, but she slips it over her head anyway like a shield.

“Like I told you, I was on the streets for a long time,” she says more harshly than she intends to. “Things get to feeling pretty hopeless when you’re hungry and scared all of the time and when someone says they have something that’ll make it all go away, it doesn’t seem like such a bad idea, okay?”

Sam nods. “I get that, I guess, but… uh…” He flushes. “I was kind of wondering what happened last night. I guess, we must have…” He waves at her a little helplessly.

“Yeah, we did,” she tells him and feels like she should apologize. “You were pretty out of it, but seemed like you needed someone. I was someone,” she says with a little shrug. _I was Jess. Who is she? Where is she?_

Sam winces and Cosette feels awful. It only gets worse when Sam stands and wraps a battered army blanket from the cot around his waist before coming to her and putting his hands on her shoulders.

“I am so sorry, Cosette.” He looks like he wants to crawl in a hole and die.

“Huh?”

“Two years with a succubus in control of your body. Sex is probably the last thing you wanted to be doing and I feel… Jesus. I feel really shitty about it.”

She just gapes at him. “You… you didn’t even know who I was for most of it. I kind of feel like I took advantage of you, not the other way around.”

They stand that way for a long moment in the broken sunlight that streams in through the boarded up windows.

“This is really awkward,” Sam says finally.

“Yeah, no doubt about that. Um, don’t take this the wrong way or anything, but… you stink.”

He laughs at her and she thinks that he looks like a shy little boy, for all of his hugeness. It shouldn’t jive with the guns and the dangerous, crazy things he gets up to like jumping between buildings and demon killing, but, somehow, it does. “Says the homeless girl,” he says lightly. “We should, uh, clean up. Get dressed and figure things out. I’ve got some people that might be able to take you in until things from Chicago die down a little.”

“I don’t need to be taken in.”

Sam lets her go and gives her a tiny shove towards her bags. “Yeah, Cosette. You kinda do.” He doesn’t mention the heroin or the track marks, but she supposes that he’s thinking of it. She doesn’t bother telling him that demon possession is a great way to get through detox and that she hasn’t thought about getting a fix once since waking up. Once a junkie, always a junkie. It’s what he has to be thinking and she doesn’t fault him for it.

“What about you?” She bends down to the bag that she supposes is now hers. It’s a treasure trove of luxuries – little bottles of shampoo, liquid soap, and more clean underwear than she’s owned since she was a kid. She pulls things out, finds a clean camisole and a pretty, girlish top of eyelet lace and puts it with the jeans Sam had stripped off of her last night. “Where do you go when you’re not saving people from monsters?”

She looks over her shoulder and sees Sam shrug as he takes clean clothing out of his own bag.

“Don’t tell me you stay here? Sam… this isn’t you.”

“Yeah, it is,” he tells her. “I move around a lot. Comes with the job. Car’s probably the only home I’ve got since… yeah. I move around.”

“Isn’t there anyone?” she asks and she doesn’t know why she does. There are plenty of people in the world without anyone solid and comfortable in their lives. She’s one of them.

“Doesn’t need to be,” he tells her and stands. He throws her an extra towel that smells like dryer sheets and his cologne. “I have the water rigged up, but only in the kitchen. It’ll be a little awkward, but we should be able to clean up okay. Just don’t make any plans on drinking it. It’s more rust than water.”

She lets him have the deflection and goes with him into the kitchen.

They take turns sticking their head under the tap that, after several minutes of alarming knocking and running dark brown, lightens up enough to bathe with. They let the water pool around them to the worn tile floor, wash without trying to look at one another, and do their best to act like they’re not standing naked together in an abandoned house in the middle of where Cosette doesn’t exactly know.

Sam only touches her when she tries to rinse the shampoo out of her hair and gets soap in her eye for the trouble. He leans in and hands her a towel to dab at her eyes and then takes over rinsing her hair with the empty Big Gulp cup he’d found in the study. His fingers are sure and she gets the feeling that he’s done this a time or two. She wonders if he did this for his Jess, wonders how he can alternate from confident to shy to dangerous and sad so easily.

Sam squeezes the last of the water out of her hair and turns the tap off. It groans and knocks a few times in protest before the water slows to a trickle, then dies. “Still not weird?” he asks her.

Cosette stands before him, naked and shining with water dripping down her back and between her breasts and suddenly finds that she’s a little shy, too. She ducks her head and sets to drying her hair. “Okay, it’s a little weird.”

“Thank God,” Sam says lightly, “you’re normal.”

“One of us should be,” she says more harshly than she means to. He just gets her so damned flustered and it’s not something she’s used to at all.

Sam doesn’t seem to take offense, just smiles at her ruefully and goes back to the study, bare assed and glorious while toweling his own hair.

Cosette follows him. Her clothes are in the other room, after all, and if she’s going to figure out what to do with herself, she at least needs to be dressed to do it.

They dress in silence, pointedly not looking one another while they slip on underwear and shirts, fumbling lightly around one another as they reach for socks and jeans. She doesn’t realize she’s hungry until Sam hands her a foil wrapped package of Pop Tarts and a Slim Jim. She tears into it, ravenous, and alternates between devouring everything he’s given her, sucking back the warm Gatorade, and watching him.

For all of his size, he eats like a bird. Nibbles a bit on the crumbling blueberry pastry and wipes his hands on his jeans obsessively. Twice for every tiny bite he takes. He sits on the cot, one long leg on the floor, and seems like he’s trying to make himself eat. He grows steadily more pale with eat swallow of food and starts to sweat again.

It’s hard to remember that he’s sick most of the time. He just goes on, ignores how he feels until he can’t, and it makes her a little bit sad to think of him this way and on his own. She wonders how he got this way, wonders again about the ghost of Jess that seems to live in his heart and the heartbroken pleas he’d been uttering before he’d woken the night before.

_Dean. Please, Dean. Please._

Her musing is interrupted by rounded tones emerging from Sam’s bag. He reaches down for it, his face twisting for a second like he’s in pain, and sits up with his cell phone in his hand. Sam frowns at it and Cosette doesn’t think that he’s going to answer. He sighs and presses the phone, holding it up to his ear as he stands.

“Hey,” Sam says into the phone and waves her back down to the couch when she half rises.

Cosette sits back down and eats her Slim Jim in all of its greasy, foul tasting glory. She knows she shouldn’t listen, but Sam hasn’t gone far and it’s old habit for her to pay attention to the things people don’t always want to be heard. She supposes Sam probably doesn’t want her listening in on his conversation, but he doesn’t go far enough to prevent it. She wonders at that. It seems like the sort of thing he’d normally make sure of, but he’s been sick and Cosette figure he must just be a bit off his game.

“No, I’m fine,” Sam is saying in the other room. “Jesus, Ruby, why do you have to make it sound like I’m some kid running away from home? I told you, I needed some time… yes, because of Houston. We’re supposed to save people, save them, not stab them in the neck when it gets a little tough… no, I didn’t forget that it was demon… What? You didn’t even give me a chance to try! I am, Ruby, you God damned know I am and stronger every day… The succubus from the other day disagrees, thank you… yes… yes and all on my own… Are you seriously asking me that? Really? You know, I have larger concerns than some jealous fit you’re having... You really want to know? Fine. Yes, I did. With the succubus. Happy?”

Cosette bites her lip and wishes now that she could flip a switch and shut her ears off. She tries humming to herself, but it doesn’t help. She can still hear him perfectly.

“No, I haven’t forgotten about Lilith… Don’t bring him into this. I swear to God, just don’t… Because he’s my brother… No, I know exactly what you meant, but you don’t get to talk about him and you don’t get to use his death like some kind of fucking stick to poke me in the ass… Yeah? Well, maybe Dean was right and I should just stay as far away from you… Maybe I do mean it, yeah… “

From the tone of his voice, Cosette doesn’t think that he means it at all and as certain as she is that she doesn’t want to be eavesdropping on Sam, she leans to the left a little bit, listening in spite of herself. She can’t quite help it. Sam dropped in out of nowhere, saved her from a demon, and Cosette’s too curious to get up and leave him to his conversation with Ruby, whoever she might be.

“Don’t you think there isn’t anything I wouldn’t give for that?” Sam says, his voice rising with anger and the undercurrent of sorrow that Cosette is growing accustomed to hearing when he speaks of his brother.

“There isn’t a day that goes by that I wouldn’t trade places with him… Yeah, well, knowing my brother’s dead and rotting in hell for me _is_ hell, Ruby, and I wish-I wish… Jesus Christ, I miss him so much and you’re just making it worse… No… No… I know you didn’t… Hey, I’m sorry, okay? I’m sorry. I just need… Jesus, I don’t know what I need,” Sam says. He sounds anguished and it makes Cosette feel an unwelcome little pang. She’s suddenly irritated with this friend of Sam’s who seems to know him and know him well, but hasn’t done anything to ease the ache of his brother’s loss. Then again, she supposes, if what he’s said is true about his brother, Cosette doesn’t suppose that there’s anything that would make him feel better.

 Sam’s pacing in the next room. Long, slow strides across the kitchen and she can hear each step that takes him by the back door where the floor creaks. She listens to him. Step, step, step, creak, and then the same in reverse. She doesn’t know if the pacing calms him or not, but his voice is no longer so strident. Just tired.

“Not yet,” Sam’s saying. “Because I’m asking you to trust me. I’m asking for some time here, okay? I have some things to take care of is why… No… Yeah, well, it’s not like any crossroads demon is giving me the time of day anyway, so don’t worry about it. I just need to help someone is all… No…The girl the succubus possessed, okay? The heat’s on her because of the demon and I need to help her lay low for a while… Yeah, Sam Winchester, white knight, that’s me all right… No! Come on, Ruby, you’ll freak her out…”

 _Freak me out how?_ Cosette wonders.

“Look, I need to take some time for me, too. I feel like shit lately… I’m not nine… No, I get it, but I’m not a kid and you’re not him. I can manage being sick all by myself, thank you very much… Whatever… Jesus, fine. I’ll call in a few days to let you know where I am… Because I said so… Bye, Ruby. I said _bye_.”  


Sam stalks back into the study and Cosette ducks her head, feeling more flushed and embarrassed than she had earlier. She’s come into the middle of Sam’s story, has no clue what’s going on with him, but all of the little facts dropping into place only give rise to more questions. She feels like asking about his brother, asking what Sam had meant when he’d said he was rotting in hell. Two years ago, she’d have taken it for a figurative statement, the kind of thing people used in reference to prison or maybe rehab. But now? It makes her hastily consumed breakfast twist in her gut and the realization that there really is a hell and that people can go there, that Sam’s brother for God sakes might actually be burning down there, terrifies her.

“Um… I should…” _Go,_ she thinks. _I should go because this is too big for me._

But he turns to her with a stricken expression on his face and Cosette stays where she is.

“I don’t want to be a problem,” she says. “Really.”

The sheen of sweat is back on his face, but it’s only when he makes a choked little heave that Cosette realizes he’s going to throw up again.

“Sam…”

He drops the phone in the general direction of his bag and hurries to the kitchen. He has the door open and has dropped down on his knees on the splintered wood of the back porch by the time Cosette reaches him.

What little he’s eaten is already gone and Sam’s heaving long strings of spit. She puts a hand on his back, feels him flinch because she figures he must not think he’s supposed to have help for this kind of thing, but she leaves it there anyway, rubbing little circles across the jut of his spine until he rises up to his knees. Sam turns his face to the sun and breathes slowly with his eyes closed like he’s trying to will himself to feel better.

“Better?” she asks.

“No. Least… least I’m not puking still, though.”

“Maybe you should go back to bed for a while.”

Sam lowers his head and cracks open one eye, looking exhausted, but still somehow like a pissy child in a man’s body. “There’s a lot to figure out. We’ll do that and then I’ll rest a bit before we take off. Any particular place you want to try? I know people in Idaho, Arizona, Montana…”

Cosette gapes at him as he gets his feet under him. She doesn’t mean to, but he switches stations from sick to capable so easily that it’s almost inhuman. She scrambles to her feet to follow him, but winds up getting beneath his arm when he falters and catches on the kitchen door.

“Son of a bitch,” Sam hisses. “Vertigo. Great. If this turns out to be as bad as the flu bug I had the year before I went off to college, I may just end it all now.”

“It’s not gonna make you puke again, is it?” She asks.

“Hope not,” he mumbles. “We’ll just walk very slowly.”

“Okay. Look,” she says as the work their way through the kitchen, both of them slipping a little in the puddle from their earlier bath. “I know you’re like some kind of big, tough demon killing bad ass and that having me around is slowing things down for you, but I really think you need to sleep this off a little, Sam.”

“I’ll be fine,” he tells her. “Just need a minute, okay?”

 _No, it’s not okay and you’re the most stubborn, unreal guy I’ve ever met. What is it with you, anyway?_ “You don’t have to save me all over again, you know,” she says, ignoring everything else running through her head.

Sam doesn’t answer her. They make it back to the study and he lets her lead him to the cot. He brushes away the blueberry Pop Tart like it’s the single most offensive thing he’s ever seen. Despite his earlier declarations, he stretches out without Cosette’s prompting and lies very still in the way that people do when the world is spinning madly around them.

“Couple minutes,” Sam tells her. “Then we’ll figure out where you want to go.”

“Uh-huh,” she says quietly and sits down Indian style next to the cot. “Good plan.”

*

Sam gets worse as the morning wears on. The sweat turns cold on him and he alternates between shivering in a huddled fetal position and trying to strip everything he’s got on in a fevered daze. She loses him to his dreams well before noon and it sets Cosette to pacing worriedly when he starts calling for Dean again.

“Dean can’t answer you,” she mumbles quietly. “Because he’s in hell, right? Right. Oh, God, what am I _doing_?”

She finds Tylenol in Sam’s duffle bag. It takes her several failed attempts to get it down him with some of the Gatorade she hadn’t finished, but she thinks maybe the yellow stain on Sam’s shirt might be worth it if it keeps his fever down. She sits with him, feeling useless and scared, moping his brow with water from the rosary jugs and she thinks he’s started to quiet, has started to lose interest in calling for Dean when he sits up suddenly.

“Sam?”

He doesn’t see her. He gets to his feet and he should be unable to do it, should be weak as a kitten and half as sturdy, but he manages it in one graceful movement that shocks her. Sam strides to the middle of the study, unconsciously stepping over their bags and things strewn about the floor.

“Get away from him.” He’s seething and Cosette is torn between wanting to shrink away from him and getting up to make sure he doesn’t hurt himself.

“It’s different this time,” Sam says to the air. “I’m different.”

He holds out his hand in one angry, furious movement and stands there in a way that looks kind of gawky and unnatural, but which ends up making Cosette start to tremble. She doesn’t know what he’s doing, what his intent is or what he thinks he’s seeing, but it scares her.

She draws her knees up to her chest and tries not to look at him, but she can’t make herself look away. For some reason, she feels like it’s vital that someone be witness to this.

Sam draws his head up and stands there, furious, but proud and triumphant, too. “I told you, bitch. You’re not taking him. I hope you spend a hot eternity in hell wishing you’d never messed with my brother.”

His nose is bleeding and Cosette doesn’t know why, but it can’t be a good thing. She’s still twitching with the desire to flee, but she can’t watch the blood trickle down his upper lip and then divert to one side like it’s trying to outline half of his mouth.

She goes on hands and knees to where one of the towels has been cast. She takes it with shaking hands and makes herself stand up and go to him. She’s half a step away when he shouts, the sound of his disbelief and his heartbreak shredding her.

“Dean! No,  I swear… I swear, it’s okay. I know I promised, but I had to. You know I had to, man.”

Sam’s face crumples. He doesn’t weep, but stands there like he’s been struck. “You don’t mean that.”

Cosette tries to catch him when his legs buckle, but he’s too big for her to manage. They go down hard on their knees and Sam just hangs his head. She reaches out with the towel and tentatively wipes at his lip with one corner.

“He said Dad was right,” Sam tells her numbly.

“Right about what?” she asks.

“About killing me. Dean said Dad was right and he should’ve killed me because I’m a… monster.”

“What fucking parent would say something like that? What kind of brother?” she asks him, horrified, scared, and so many things that she doesn’t even think she can name.

“The best kind,” Sam says quietly. “Dean’s the best kind of brother.”

 _Yeah, well he sounds like an asshole._ She doesn’t say it, just loops her arm though his and pulls on him until he stands. His earlier surge of grace is gone and he weaves drunkenly as she steers him back to the cot. Sam goes meekly, stopping only to scrub at his eyes like a little boy seconds away from insisting that he’s not going to cry.

Cosette gets him back in bed and sits on the edge. She pours more of what she supposes must be some kind of holy water onto the towel and cleans the blood off of his face. “I don’t think you’re a monster, Sam.”

“You don’t even know, Cosette,” surprising her a little by finding his way back to the here and now. “You just don’t even know.”

She smoothes his damp hair back from his forehead and, when he doesn’t object, she continues to stroke him like her mother had a thousand years ago when she’d been little and thought that the worst thing in the world was other kids being mean to her at school.

“You saved my life, maybe my soul. Kept me safe from cops, got me out of the city, and have fed me and given me a place to sleep. Monsters don’t do that, Sam. They don’t. I… I don’t know what’s happening. I don’t know where you’ve been or what you’ve done, but I’m awake and alive for the first time in years. Years, Sam. You’re the first person who’s taken care of me since my mother died. Not because you wanted something, but just because you could. That makes you a good man in my book. Do you understand? A _good_ man, Sam.”

“I keep trying,” Sam whispers. “To be good. To be the kind of man Dean and my Dad would be proud of, but it’s so hard with them gone.”

“Isn’t there anyone left? Friends or…”

“They can’t help me,” Sam tells her. “Not with this and it’s better for them if they don’t even try. It’s better if I’m on my own.”

“I don’t think it is. I think you’re so lonely and sad that it’s killing you,” Cosette replies. She doesn’t expect Sam to say anything and he doesn’t. She continues to stroke his hair back from his head until he sleeps and for a long time after that.

She stays by his side until her bladder feels like it’s about to pop and she’s so hungry that she scoops up the Pop Tarts Sam had brushed off the cot earlier. The inside of the house has got to be creeping up on ninety, maybe more, and the Pop Tart has gone soft and sticky. She eats it in five large bits anyway on her way to the kitchen and sets the rest of it on the counter next to the sink.

Outside she goes down the steps of the porch and glances around. She can’t see anyone, can’t see signs of even civilization from where she’s standing. The nearest house is a tiny dot to her left and she’s not really certain if it’s inhabited or not. Figuring it’s safe, she ducks to the side of one of the large trees, unzips her pants, and squats to pee with the ease of someone who’s done it that way a million times.

It’s not until she’s back inside, shoving the second Pop Tart into her mouth that she realizes just how bad everything really is.

Sam’s on the floor, sitting with his back to the bed, with his head back. He has a silver flask to his lips and he makes a needy, mewling sound as he taps the bottom of it and begs for something to come out.

Cosette’s gaze finds the half bottle of whiskey on the table and suddenly everything clicks with horrid clarity.

Sam’s having DTs. He’s not sick. He’s withdrawing.

And though it’s something that she’s more than passing familiar with, having seen more than a few alcoholics drying out in the hardest ways imaginable, she still feels her stomach bottom out with horror. Because as bad as it is now, it’s probably only going to get worse.

“Oh, shit,” she breathes.

*

She stands there for the longest time. Sam doesn’t do any of the things she expects when he lowers the flask and notices her standing there. He doesn’t act guilty, doesn’t make excuses, or beg her for more booze. He just caps the flask and puts it back in his pocket. He watches her and when she doesn’t move, his gaze softens.

“Are you all right?”

Cosette startles a little at the question and thinks, somehow, it’s just so like him. She looks again at the bottle of whiskey on the makeshift table and remembers everything she knows about withdrawal. Alcoholics are different than heroin users. The drying out period is worse, comes loaded with DTs and medical issues that she can’t even name. Going cold turkey on heroin is horrid. The one time she’d tried it before her rather unconventional demon-possessed rehab, she’d felt so sick and so anxious. She’d wanted to die, but she’d known who she was, where she was. Alcoholics can die trying to quit and Cosette has seen them on the street, going out ugly – confused, seizing and dying because their hearts can’t keep up with the strain.

Sam needs a hospital or, in lieu of that, he needs a drink. The thought leaves her cold, but it’s somehow less terrible than the thought of him dying here in this forgotten house.

Cosette swallows hard and blinks until the threat of tears passes. She does her best to smile and figures it must come off as pretty ghastly when Sam’s eyebrows pinch together.

“Cosette… what happened? What’s wrong?”

“It’s all right,” she answers and walks to the table, makes herself pick up the bottle of whiskey and unscrew the cap from the top. “I just realized something is all.”

“What did you realize?”

“How totally screwed I am,” Cosette says without thinking. And when guilt creeps across Sam’s face, she adds to that, not wanting him to feel badly for sticking her with his addiction in the middle of nowhere. “I mean, I just don’t know how to do anything,” she hedges. She finds one of their empty cups from the last gas station and, finding it empty, she pours a little bit of the whiskey into it. “I’ve been on the streets since I was eighteen. Didn’t finish high school or anything. I haven’t ever had a job unless you want to count panhandling. Now the cops want me, probably for murder. I don’t have anywhere to go and I’m not good for much. Guess it just hit me, is all.”

She holds the paper cup out to him. Sam gives it a sniff and then makes a face like it turns his stomach. He doesn’t look at it again, but stares up at her, again so apologetic. “I’m sorry about all of this, Cosette. I know I said we’d get this figured out and trust me, we will. I wasn’t kidding when I said I knew people. There’s been… a lot of people that have had their lives turned upside down because of stuff like this. I don’t have a network or a support group or anything, but I know people who have been through this kind of thing and who can help you figure out what to do.”

Cosette looks down at the whiskey again and doesn’t know why he’s refusing it. Even if it’s not his preferred drink, which doesn’t make sense since it’s his bottle, after all, at the stage he’s at, he should be ready to try downing mouthwash or rubbing alcohol.

She decides to just be direct, well, as direct as she can be without saying ‘look, you’re a drunk, chug some of this down and everything will be fine.’ She puts the cup in his hand. “Drink some of this. I think it’ll help you feel better.”

“You sound like Dean,” he says with a tight, little laugh. “I don’t think it’ll do much for me and doubt I could keep it down. The Tylenol’s helped some though, don’t worry.”

“You, uh, you really don’t want a drink?”

“No,” Sam says with a shrug.

“God, I think I do,” she replies and takes the cup. She swallows the whiskey in one fiery gulp, wincing at the burn. “Yuck, how do you drink that stuff?”

“Dunno, maybe it’s a guy thing. Want me to pick up wine coolers when we head out?”

He’s teasing her. Sam seems nothing like the guy who not three hours ago was hallucinating a few feet from where they’re sitting and she doesn’t understand. Not at all. Withdrawal is like any other illness in some ways, there are very, very bad days punctuated with better ones, but it’s weird to see someone flip so quickly.

“I just don’t understand,” she tells him and sets the cup down so that she can feel his forehead. He’s still too warm, even for the steamy heat of the August day, but it’s nothing like it was before. “One minute you’re puking and hallucinating, the next you wake up and are mostly all right again. Sam, this is… this is just weird.”

Sam takes her hand and gives it a little squeeze. “I’ve had the flu like this before. When I was seventeen, I ran fevers so high that I didn’t know where I was or what was happening. Thought my brother had left me alone and he was with me the whole time. It happens.”

Cosette sits back on her heels. “Bullshit this is the flu. No way. You don’t really think it is.”

For the first time, Sam looks away from her with the sort of guilt she expects – born out of shame instead of concern for her. He fidgets, rubs his palms against his jeans and opens his mouth a couple of times like he’s trying to figure out what to say.

“It’s all right,” she tells him. “I’m not mad at you. We can figure this out. I’m just… I’m a little scared here, Sam. I don’t know how to help and there’s no one to tell me what we should do. Maybe we should find a doctor or…”

“No,” Sam interrupts. “They can’t help.”

“Yes, they can,” she says.

“Not with this.” He looks at her, red creeping up his neck and coloring his cheeks and she doesn’t know if he’s embarrassed or starting to flush again with fever. Her hands twitch as she resists the urge to feel his forehead again. “I think it was the demon, Cosette. Ruby… well, she knows a lot about demons. I guess you could say she has personal experience. When I wanted to go to Chicago and track down the succubus, we fought about it. She said that I wasn’t up for it, that they’re very persuasive, dangerous sorts of demons to deal with. I guess she was right.”

“You think the demon made you sick?” She supposes it’s not impossible, supposes that if demons are real that everything else has suddenly gone out the window and that anything’s possible now.

“A succubus kills by draining life energy,” Sam tells her. “They drain their victims during sex. And, well…”

“But we didn’t have sex. Or, you and the demon or whatever didn’t. It was just a hand job,” she blurts out and then has to look away when she feels heat rising in her own cheeks. She suddenly wants another shot of whiskey, but stays where she is, kneeling on the floor next to him.

Sam smiles a little ruefully. “I don’t think it really matters.”

She looks to his pocket where he’s hidden the flask and, as logical as he makes everything sound, Cosette still feels the same sliver of dread. Addict, addict, addict, Sam’s an addict. “You don’t think it could be anything else?”

The dread doesn’t go away when Sam hesitates. “No,” he says after a long minute. “Not unless I really do have the flu.”

“What do we do?”

Sam blows out a little breath. “Treat it like any other illness, I guess. Rest and fluids.”

Cosette looks down at the empty cup, still wondering. She thinks about the flask and the needy sound he’d made when not one more drop of whatever was inside would come out. Something new, she decides. She’s seen him naked and while she hadn’t exactly looked between his toes or studied his groin, she knows that he’s not shooting up. It’s possible he could be smoking or snorting something, but she doesn’t think so. He’s never rubbed at his nose or sounded hoarse or junky the way she knows crack smokers sometimes do, and God knows he’s just too fit and clean with teeth too white and perfect to be into meth. It’s the flask, she knows. There’s something in the flask and if it’s not booze, then it must be something else. A life on the streets isn’t exactly a formal education into the ways and means of using and with what Sam does? With what he knows? There’s bound to be things she’s never heard of.

She wants to believe him. She really does and the fact that she’s actually wishing that he’s just sick from exposure to whatever kind of thing Esther might have done to him tells her one thing – she doesn’t believe a word. No matter how hard she tries.

Cosette looks at him, hating him a little for putting her through this. She mops the sweat from his brow with her palm, making him smile in a sad way that people sometimes do at funerals. “Let’s get you back to bed then and…”

She thinks about the flask. “Maybe get some of these clothes off of you. If the fever gets worse, you should be as cool as we can make you.”

Sam nods and starts unbuttoning his shirt. Cosette goes to work on his shoelaces and she’s just got one shoe off when he makes a strange little snort. He’s got most of the buttons undone, but he’s looking down at her, or maybe just through her. She thinks he’s starting to go again, thinks maybe he’s seeing someone else entirely and she braces herself in case he’s about to call her Jess.

“What?” she asks.

“My brother,” and here Sam’s lips move into the saddest, most wistful smile she’s ever seen. “I was just thinking… he’d have some line about a girl trying to get his clothes off. And it’d be cheesy and tacky as all get out, but he’d follow it with this smile… this wicked, joyful smile and it’s like-it’s like the chicks just can’t help but smile back.”

“He had a way with women, did he?”

“Ohh, yeah,” Sam tells her. “Dean… Dean’s a real charmer. Guess maybe some people would say it’s being a pig, going through so many women, but he is-wasn’t. He was just good at living. Knew how to look at a shitty, depressing motel room and say ‘holy shit, Sammy, there’s color TV or magic fingers or dude, we can see the mountains from here.’ Dean was just so God damned good at the little things.”

She gives his foot a little squeeze. “What would he say about this place?”

Sam smiles again. “No neighbors, no screaming kids, we can pee off the porch…”

“He wouldn’t…”

“He did.”

She thinks about relieving herself in the backyard and the number of times she’s peed inside compared to outside. She shakes her head. “Oh, man…”

“And there’s flowers growing in the house, Sammy. Right up through the floor. That’s pretty cool. And… and there’s this wonderful, kind girl who hasn’t left and I don’t know why, Sammy, but she hasn’t left and that’s kind of amazing.” Sam catches her eye. “That’s seriously really amazing.”

Cosette busies herself with his other shoe, pulls at the laces until she’s nearly got them free of the sneaker entirely. She takes his shoe off before unlacing it entirely. “You’re the first truly kind person I’ve met in a long, long time. I can’t just go. I wouldn’t.”

“Thank you,” Sam tells her. “Really.”

She nods, blinks a few times to clear what she’s telling herself is just sweat from her eyes. She pulls his socks off and, when Sam lifts his butt after undoing his jeans, she pulls those down too. When he’s down to his t-shirt and boxer briefs, she helps him stand.

“Can’t go anyway,” she says, trying to keep her voice light. “I don’t really know how to drive and I don’t think I’m gonna con anyone on a bus into buying me a coffee with four of those little green creamers in it. Guess you’re stuck with me until you’re better.”

“My other nursemaids are going to be jealous,” Sam tells her.

“Oh, there’s a pack of them, huh?”

“Loads.” He sits down on the bed again and rolls his shoulders to crack his back. “I have tons of people ready to help me puke and watch me sweat.”

Cosette pushes him lightly in the center of the chest until he lies back down. She stands over him with a little smirk. “I bet none of them can jump between rooftops though.”

Sam grabs her hand. “Not one. Not a single one.”

She smiles at him, feeling a little better despite the gnawing worry in her gut that he has to be coming down from something. “You know, you’re kind of a charmer, too.”

It’s not until later when Sam’s trying to choke down some Gatorade that she gets into the flask. She has her back to him and is ostensibly folding his jeans. She slips it out of his pocket and unscrews the cap as quickly and as quietly as she can. Cosette lifts it to her nose, thinking to herself that it’s stupid, it’s just so stupid because he’s fine now, he’s just fine and even if there is something weird inside, she’s not going to know what it is or what to do about it. Chances are good, she won’t even recognize what she’s smelling at all.

She doesn’t even have to draw a breath. She can’t see into the flask, but she knows the smell. It reeks of blood with something foul, like rotten eggs, riding beneath it.

Cosette glances over her shoulder at him. Sam smiles, tired, but sweet, and she feels the bottom of her stomach drop as she suddenly feels quite cold.

She can’t look at him as the day goes on. When he begins to sweat, caught again in the fever, she sits with him, strokes his hair idly when he lets her, but Cosette’s gaze never lingers on his face. She studies his hands, so large with their long capable fingers. She mops his brow with a t-shirt she’s pulled out of his bag and sometimes she drags it across his eyes because she’s not looking down at him. Sam’s too dazed to object or really notice.

Sometimes he holds onto her hand and he curls in upon himself as much as the narrow cot and his large frame will allow. Sometimes he moans that it hurts, that he’s sure he’s dying, that it’s the curse of a demon he shouldn’t have been playing with, and she lets him. Lets him nearly crush her much smaller hand in his as she looks over at the boarded up window and watches bees and all manner of tiny insects dart amongst the honeysuckle blooms that seem to thrive in the ungodly, sweltering heat.

It must be close to one hundred degrees in the house. There’s very little breeze outside and next to no moving air inside.

Cosette gets up. She has to pry her hand free of Sam’s by undoing his fingers one at a time. She wonders if he thinks she’s leaving him. She wonders why she’s not doing that very thing.

She goes outside through the front door and takes stock of the old house. It’s a derelict structure, but there’s just a bit left of the grandness it used to know. She thinks it must have been very fine once, must have housed a dozen happy families before it had been left to fall apart out in the country in the middle of nowhere. She wishes that she could go back in time and walk inside again, find children playing on the floor or dinner cooking in the kitchen. Wishes that she could go take a bath and find a bed to sleep on that didn’t have Sam already there, reeking of sweet and dying of withdrawal from…

No. She’s not going to think about it. She’s not going to ponder the horrific nature of Sam’s addiction, not now when she’s so far from help. So far from safety or someone who might understand what’s going on or how to help him. And she’s most certainly not going to think about what kind of man can kill demons and drinks blood from a flask. There’s a name for that, she knows, and she doesn’t want to apply it to Sam. He saved her. More than that, she likes him. Scared as she is, of him, of what she thinks is happening to him, she just likes him.

Instead she empties her mind of everything. It’s something she’s good at, or used to be before Esther came and gave her nothing but time to think and to fear what was to come. It might have taken heroin after a few years living on the streets, but before the possession, Cosette had gotten very good at just checking out. She’d never been much of a daydreamer in her life before. There’d been too much to do, too much living taking place for her to waste time on daydreams or absent-minded tasks. She’d had school and friends, her dance club and her mother who tried endlessly to teach her French in preparation for the trip to Paris they’d never taken.

Cosette wishes now she’d paid attention to her mother’s amused and frustrated attempts at teaching her the language of her father now. It would give her something to do, but nothing will come. She can count to five and say _je m’apelle Cosette._ Or maybe it’s _je suis Cosette_ or both. Most of those memories contain very little language. They are instead filled with laughter and her mother’s put upon sighs as Cosette cheerily butchered the language her mother had taught high school kids for years.

Life with very little laughter had shown her the value of mindlessness. Hours had been spent observing Chicago’s blue skies in the spring. Days had been lost admiring a bit of pretty colored glass she’d found. It helped her forget her hunger, her fear. It made it easier when she looked up one day at the rough, unwashed crowd around her and realized that she was one of them.

She’s clean again. Could maybe walk through a mall or a grocery store without security following her without any pretense at subtlety. Someone might give her a seat or buy her a coffee and not expect her to blow them in return for the favor or offer her a night in a warm bed and the promise of shooting up. She doesn’t look like that person any more.

She has a demon and her addicted, dying savior to thank for it. It’s too much to consider, so she doesn’t.

She instead contemplates the boards that cover the window. The honeysuckle vines are thick and blooming. It’s almost a shame to think of ruining them, but the house is too hot for a healthy person, let alone Sam.

Cosette grips the vines and starts pulling, ignoring the buzz of little bees and a few lumbering bumblebees that seems to tumble over one another as she disrupts their feast.  The bees leave her unmolested, but she remembers that ants can bite as a sudden swarm of them come up from nowhere, covering her hand and nipping painfully at the insult of her presence.

She brushes them off and stomps on the ground, grinding her foot into the greenery in the hopes of crushing the anthill, if it’s even there. She then returns to attacking the vines, pulling them free with tiny little pops as the creepers pull loose from the old wood.

A bumblebee thumps into her nose, drunk on nectar and seemingly confused by the sudden alteration in its buffet. Cosette blows at it and it wobbles away on its too small wings. When the boards are mostly exposed, she grabs the bottom one and pulls. It doesn’t come easily. She’s forced to brace her foot against the decaying siding.

There’s a groaning creak and the sound of splintering wood as a warning, then Cosette’s down on her butt in the grass and greenery with grasshoppers leaping away from her in alarm. She’s knocked herself in the face with the board, split her lip and her tongue is bleeding again as well. She tastes the copper in her mouth. Licks her lips and sits there for a moment, just wondering.

When she starts to shudder at the taste and the things she’s trying very hard not to think about it, Cosette lets go of the board and stands. The second board comes easier. The third takes her nearly an hour because of its height. All the while blood swims in her mouth and she’s shaking as she resolutely refuses to consider why and what she might be thinking of doing.

When she’s done, Cosette stands on her tip toes and peers into the house. She lets out a startled yelp and drops down to her knees, hiding with her heart pounding high and hard in her throat.

Sam had been sitting up and staring at her, body contorted in a way that she can’t quite make right in her mind at all. The unnatural twist to his limbs had been awful, but it’s his expression that has her so scared – for that split second, there hadn’t been anything human in it at all.

 _Get out,_ she tells herself. _You’ve done what you can and God knows you owe him, but get out. Get out, get out, get out._

She’s crouched down, poised like a frightened deer to flee when he calls for her.

“Cosette?”

God damn him, but he sounds so sweet, so fucking confused and weak and the parts of her that aren’t supposed to exist at all after the life she’s led twist. The instinct to run wars with the urge to go to him, to help him.

In the end, it’s Sam saying nothing more than “um, are you there?” that causes her to swallow hard and stand. She wants to run with every step she takes back inside the house and she’s shaking so hard that her teeth are very nearly chattering.

Cosette makes herself go into the side room they’ve settled into, though it’s a long moment before she can raise her head and look at him.

“Are you all right?” There’s nothing unnatural about him when he asks it, nothing other than the waxy paleness of his skin and the rivulets of sweat dripping from his hair.

She startles again and feels absurdly like she’s going to cry. “I thought… I thought I saw… you.”

“You thought you saw me?” Sam asks. His voice is slightly slurred and he’s rocking a little bit as if his spine is seconds from losing the ability to hold him upright.

 _You scared me,_ she thinks. _You should scare me all of the time and you don’t and that’s worse._

Cosette sniffs to keep from crying. “It’s so hot,” she tells him finally.

“Get some water,” he tells her not unkindly as he gestures to the jugs of holy water on the bowed shelves.

She nods and forces herself not to skirt away from him when she draws near. Cosette takes one of the jugs down and untwists the cap. The rosary bobs along the bottom of the plastic as she raises it to her lips. “It’s okay to drink?”

“So long as you’re not a demon or anything else unnatural.”

She considers that as she takes a long drink. It’s warm and the metal of the rosary gives it taste like it’s been sitting in a tin can, but it’s good. She takes two more swallows and makes herself go to Sam, jug in hand.

She offers it to him. _So long as you’re not a demon or anything else unnatural,_ she thinks. “You look like you could use some.”

His hands are shaking when he reaches for the gallon jug and Cosette raises it to his lips, unwilling to let this pass because he’s too weak to hold it. Sam smiles at her, grateful, weary, and sweet, and puts his lips to the rim. She tilts it a little too much and water dribbles down his chin, but Sam drinks deeply. He swallows without pause, without any reaction at all.

“Thank you,” he says when he’s had his fill.

She screws the cap back on. “Guess there’s nothing unnatural about us.”

The look he gives her is strange. “Guess not.”

Cosette sighs and sits down on the free end of the cot. She draws her legs up and sits Indian style. For a long moment she and Sam regard one another, she thinking so many things that she wishes she could just stop, that she could go back to daydreaming or find more mindless tasks to occupy her. She can’t even begin to guess what he’s thinking.

“How do you know all of this stuff,” she asks when the silence becomes unbearable and Sam seems like he’s a flower wilting in the heat.

He manages to straighten somewhat and he gives her the sort of heartbroken, wry little grin that keeps her with him when she knows it’s smarter to run. “Grew up that way. My brother and me. It’s all we knew, all I thought I’d ever know until I went off to college.”

It’s the second time he’s mentioned college to her. He says it in the same way that people talk of vacations they’d taken long ago – wistful and a little sad like the memories of the good times are now failing him and all he can remember is that he was once there.

“How do you go from this,” she says waving around the room, “to college?”

Sam laughs bitterly. “By alienating everyone you love, mostly. Arguing and fighting and sneaking around until one day you’re standing outside some shitty house with a backpack and your acceptance letter and your brother looking like you’ve just punched him in the gut.”

“He didn’t go with you?”

“No,” Sam sighs. “No, he didn’t. I wish… I didn’t then, but I wish he had. He’d have hated it. Every second of it and, honestly, I probably would have too, but we’d have been together.”

Cosette pulls her legs in more tightly until her thighs protest a little. “What happened to him?”

He doesn’t answer and she supposes she’s not entirely surprised. Dean’s dead, in hell if what she’s heard is to be believed. She isn’t sure how she survived one demon and can’t quite imagine the horror of being surrounded by them, tortured and punished by them every second of every day. She isn’t sure she could work up a reply if it had been her family dead and burning either.

“What happened to you,” Sam asks finally. “You’re not what I’d expect from a homeless girl.”

“What do you expect?” she asks, feeling the old tension and the unthinking offense rising up. “That I was some kid who got hooked on drugs and ran away from home? That I can’t read and need the nurse at the free clinic to give me directions in small words with lots of pictures?”

“No, I didn’t…”

“Oh, it’s all right,” she says with a wave of her hand as she tries to calm down. “It’s the way things are, I guess. The street is mean. Nobody winds up there just because they wanted to get away from it all. There’s a lot of messed up, really sick people out there. And it just takes so much to stay warm and survive that there’s nothing left, you know? There’s plenty of college graduates and failed business types out there with all of the dropouts and runaways, but you probably wouldn’t know it to look at them. And, yeah, me? I was one of the dropouts and a runaway.”

 “You don’t have to tell me,” Sam says. He sounds bone weary, but also hesitant like he knows he’s offended her and wishes he could somehow take it back.

Cosette straightens a little and finds it strange that she almost relishes the feeling of having been a little mean to him. It’s easier, she thinks, than being scared.

“It’s all right,” she says again. “I… yeah. I was in school once, too. I wasn’t a straight A student or anything, but my grades were decent enough. Least until Christmas break my senior year of high school. Mom… she was a French teacher, you know. She loved everything French. We had a coffee press before it was all the rage. And she read in French, listened to old records she bought on her trip to Paris before I was born. And every break I had from dance and school, we’d drive into the city and go to this theater that played those kind of crazy French art movies that don’t make any sense, but are so pretty to watch. I had to read the subtitles. Mom tried, God did she try to teach me the language, but I was too busy. Dance and friends and who might ask me to the Senior prom – stupid crap, you know?”

“I know,” Sam replies and she thinks that he does.

“It was Christmas break and it was snowing. Everything was iced over, but it was our thing. I think mom thought I’d be bummed out if we stayed home and drank cocoa instead of freezing our butts off walking sixteen blocks from parking to the theater. So, we went and the movie… I don’t even remember it now. It was black and white. That’s all I know. Afterwards we had coffee and drove home. I was nagging her about getting my driving permit. We’d been fighting about it for two years and all my friends drove and I thought it was stupid that she was afraid to let me drive. It was just so stupid. We… there was ice because the weather was bad and we slid, we slid and there was another car. It… we hit and the car rolled and Mom… Mom…”

Sam, sick, addicted Sam who drinks from a strange, foul smelling flask reaches for her. He’s shaking, from fever, from sympathy, she doesn’t even know and he’s sour with sweat, but it feels good when he pulls her to his chest.

“She died,” Cosette tells him. “She died and I didn’t know what to do anymore. I…there were foster parents and a new school and one day, I just didn’t go home because it wasn’t home, you know? Not mine. I didn’t have one anymore. I didn’t have anything left. So, I took the bus into the city and tried to forget.”

“I don’t think we’re supposed to forget,” Sam tells her. “I think we’re just supposed to let it keep hurting.”

“For how long?”

“I don’t know,” he tells her. “Maybe forever.”

“But, it’s been forever already,” she replies and then begins to sob. It’s been brewing all day and she tells herself that she’s just tired, just too hot and scared, too confused, but she doesn’t know if that’s it at all. She’s worried. She’s frightened for Sam and of Sam and, right now, more than anything, she wishes that she was just some screw up who could pick up the phone and find her mother at home, still waiting for her after all of these years. She wishes she could open the door to their old house and find her mother there, gray in her hair now maybe. She wishes that she could take Sam to her, that she could settle him in her old bedroom and have her mother bring him weak tea and chicken soup as if that’s all that it would take to make him right again.

She wishes she’d never met Sam. She wishes that Esther had killed her. She wishes that Sam could shake this unnatural sickness that plagues him and that he’d stay with her for as long as it takes for them both to wake without missing the ones they’ve lost.  She wishes for too much and knows none of it will ever come to pass.

 _“Ne pleure pas. Tout ira bien, tu vas voir.”_  Sam strokes her hair with a shaking hand. “ _Tout ira bien.”_

Cosette wraps her arms tight around his waist. He’s too hot and she should give him air, she should give herself some air as she’s all but choking on her own sobs, but she drowns in him because he lets her and she needs him. It occurs to her later, when the fever renders him senseless and heartbroken again, that just maybe he needs her a little bit, too.

She finds a lighter in Sam’s bag and lights the lantern when it gets dark. The open window admits a flurry of insects. The moths come first, the high-pitched whine of mosquitoes second, and Cosette doesn’t really do much about it until the June bugs brazenly whir in and start buzzing around. She collects their things while Sam lies quiet and deaf to the racket of bugs testing the heat of the lantern’s glass and the tentative chirping duo of two crickets playing for one another in different rooms of the house.

Cosette stuffs everything into their bags, except for Sam’s guns, and carries the lot of it to the broken couch that she supposes she won’t be sleeping on tonight. She zips everything up, hoping that she hasn’t just sealed up a June bug in all of the new, fine things that Esther had unwillingly gifted her. They’re down to one bottle of red Gatorade, four more Slim Jims and the rest of the Pop Tarts as far as food goes. This she ties up in the plastic bag they came in. She puts it on the shelves next to Sam’s holy water and his old, fraying books.

There’s still the one jug of water, now half empty next to Sam’s cot. A black beetle is crawling up the side and she bends to flick it off when Sam goes rigid.

Cosette thinks at first that he’s having a seizure and she tries to get him on his side, though she can’t remember if she’s supposed to roll him to his left or his right. It doesn’t matter because she can’t move him and if it’s a seizure, it’s not like any she’s seen before. He’s taut, fingers curled into painful looking claws while cords stand out on his arms and his neck. He doesn’t thrash or shake, just strains as if something is holding him down and he’s trying to get free of it. Sam’s eyes are wide, pained and stricken, while he gasps for air.

“Sam?” It’s soft, when she says it, hesitant like she’s waiting for it to get worse, like she’s waiting for his eyes to roll in his head or his heart to just give out. When she touches him, and she has to make herself do it despite having spent part of the afternoon crying in his arms, every muscle she can feel is bunched tight.

Sam looks at her then and she sees more than just pain in his eyes. He’s scared. He doesn’t know what’s happening any more than she does. “De-“ he chokes out and Cosette knows what’s coming though Sam has to stutter through several broken attempts before he gets it out. “De-de-Dean. Dean!”

“H-he’s not here,” Cosette tells him. “Sam, he’s not here.”

“Dean!” His voice is panic and pure misery. All he wants is his brother, all he can think of in this state is Dean and Cosette can’t give him that. She wishes that she could.

She bites her lip as she tries to calm him. The taste of blood startles her. Cosette puts her fingers to her lips and pulls them back to stare at the red smear while Sam tries to get free from whatever’s slowly crushing him.

She looks over at their bags on the couch as if she can see his little silver flask. He hadn’t wanted liquor. The flask had smelled of blood. And he is, she firmly believes, dying from a lack of something. Her fingers tremble as she wipes at the blood on her lips.

The ruby stain isn’t much, but she holds it to Sam’s mouth as he cries out for his brother again and again.

“Try… Try,” she starts. _Try this_ , she wants to say, but can’t get it out. _Have a little blood, Sam. It’ll make it all go away. That’s what they told me about the drugs and they were right. God help me, they were right. Just a little bit, baby, and you’ll never worry about anything else again._

She brushes her fingertips against his lips and when that doesn’t leave enough blood behind, when Sam doesn’t seem to taste it, she smears them against his mouth. He opens wide, closes his mouth, but his tongue never reaches out to taste what she’s given him.

“Oh, God,” Cosette whimpers and she can’t believe what she’s doing. She drags her wounded tongue across her teeth until her mouth is flooded with blood and spit and leans over him. “Oh, God. I just… I’m sorry, Sam. I’m _sorry_.”

She lets the blood dribble down to his upturned face and when that doesn’t do much good, she takes his jaw in her hand, doesn’t even stop to think of what will happen if he bites down, and kisses him. Swirls her tongue around his mouth and milks the blood from her wound as best as she can.

Her eyes are stinging when she sits up. She blinks them quickly, tries to clear the blur of tears as she waits to see if her blood will help Sam, strengthen him as it did when he fought the demon inside of her.

Sam chokes. She waits for him to swallow and can only stare at him in horrified disappointment when he tries to turn his head, doesn’t, and just spits the blood out so that it stains his chin and his cheek. Despite his rigid state, he works it out completely, his face somehow disgusted and terrified and still so damned desperate.

“But,” Cosette says, “but that’s all I know to do. Sam? What else can I do?”

He opens his mouth and Cosette covers her ears, not certain that she can take him screaming for his dead brother again.

Sam does scream, but not even Dean’s name comes out this time. It’s a startled, shocked cry of pain and he’s suddenly standing, suddenly jerked upright on his feet, standing on the cot without his body having gone through any of the expected movements like sitting or bending at the knee.

Cosette’s knocked to the floor and she scoots away on her butt automatically as Sam stands on the cot, rigid with arms flung wide as he’s just suddenly been put on strings. Dark tendrils run beneath his skin, up his arms and across his face. It takes her a second to realize that all of his blood vessels have suddenly run black.

“Help me,” Sam begs and, though he’s allowed her to help him off and on the last two days, he’s never asked it of her, never begged, and somehow that scares her more than anything.

She yells out wordlessly as Sam’s flung to the floor as if he’s just been thrown. He lands next to her feet and Cosette scoots backwards again with a tiny mewl of fear as he reaches for her with one hand still twisted into a painful looking claw.

“Help…”

“I can’t-I can’t-I can’t.”

“God!” Sam screams and she doesn’t know if it’s a plea or a curse, maybe both because the look on his face is such torture, such agony that she wants to cover her eyes. “Please,” he gasps. “Please.”

Against all sense and better judgment, Cosette reaches towards him with a shaking hand. “S-Sam.” She just touches his cheek when he’s dragged across the floor away on his belly away from her. When his bare feet hit the wall, he’s suddenly upright again. Sam’s flat against the book shelves, arms wide like he’s holding on for dear life and then he’s rising off the floor, toes pointing down, and how, why, she doesn’t know, can’t guess.

Sam’s thrown. He’s dragged. From floor to wall to ceiling where he stares down at her, eyes huge and wide. “Dean,” he says. And then “help me.”

Cosette screams and makes for the front door on her knees until she can get her feet beneath her and run. She slams the front door wide and nearly falls down the sagging front steps in her haste to get out. She trips, goes down hard next to Sam’s car and thinks she could drive it. She drove Liz Llewellyn’s car illegally once. All the way from the high school to Liz’s parents’ house and she thinks, yeah, she could maybe do it again, but the keys, the keys are inside and she’d have to go back.

“No,” she says and stares for a second at the car.

She runs instead, Sam screaming “Dean!” behind her.

Cosette runs down the weed covered driveway to the broken two lane black top. Weeds and grass have sprouted through the cracks in the pavement. She stops in the middle of the road, looks left and then right. She can see no lights. The houses she saw are all dark and it occurs to her now that maybe they’re like the one she’s just left – abandoned.

She doesn’t know which way to go, doesn’t remember when they drove which way the town had been. It doesn’t matter and she knows she should just pick a direction and head that way. She goes left, starts jogging and then stops. Maybe they’d come from the right. She turns around, runs again in front of the house and a few steps beyond it. Stops and goes down on her knees in the middle of the road.

It’s unlikely she’s in any danger of oncoming traffic and she thinks she might welcome anyone that could come along. She could get in the car with them. She could drive far away.

She could maybe persuade them to take her to find help and…

What help is there for this? Who do you find that can stop a man from being thrown around a room by something dark in his veins?

“And why do I even care?” There’s no one to answer her.

Cosette sits down on the wrecked blacktop and pulls her knees up, hugging them. She doesn’t know where to go. She doesn’t know who to go to and the irony isn’t lost on her that the only person she knows that could help with something like this is Sam himself. At this point, he’s the only person she knows at all anymore.

“What do I do?” She asks herself and then repeats it over and over again as she watches the house and feels a combination of fear and guilt that makes her nauseous.

She should just go. It doesn’t matter where. Before Esther, before Sam, she was a faceless lost girl from the streets. She can be that again, can lose herself in the struggle to stay warm, fed, and alive. It shouldn’t be that hard. Her entire life has been about trying to forget – she can just add Sam and this nightmare to the things she doesn’t want to remember.

“Why am I still here? What am I doing?” She has no words to answer herself, only a pit in her stomach that twists equally at the thought of staying and leaving. The survival instinct, the part of her that she used to call Etta has gone quiet, and there’s nothing but a roaring rush in her ears.

Her indecision evaporates when a flash in the window catches her eye. She looks up and sees both smoke and fire. _The lantern_ , she thinks and then everything empties out of her mind save one thing – Sam.

Cosette’s up and on her feet before she even knows it, is running up the driveway and past Sam’s car so quickly that it’s just a blur of moonlight on shining dark paint and chrome. The front door with its bright orange “condemned” sign is still open. She runs through it and into the next room where Sam is no longer screaming, just moaning slightly on the floor next to the overturned cot and makeshift table.

The lantern’s smashed, flames feeding greedily on spilled oil and old wood. Sam’s too heavy to drag away and Cosette doesn’t even try, just yells at him as she runs to the broken shelves. His books and the holy water have all dropped to the floor. Water dribbles out of the two containers that were broken in the fall, but the third one is still intact.

She grabs it and opens it as she approaches the growing fire. The rosary bobs the surface as she throws it on the flames. It does no good. There’s a sizzle and a hiss, more smoke, but the fire is undaunted by the water.

They’re going to burn. Sam’s going to burn.

Cosette shocked by the thrill of determination that rises up. She can’t let that happen. She can’t. Not after what he’s done for her, not after he set her free in more ways than one. It just isn’t fair.

She goes for the mattress. She steps on Sam in the process, would maybe barely notice but for the fact that she falls and goes down hard, wrenching her ankle as she falls on him. Sam grunts beneath her and everything slows down to a crawl when she turns to look at him.

“R-run,” he tells her. The flames are rising behind her, creeping up the wall and casting his pale face in a warm, orange glow.

She touches his cheek. “You run.”

Cosette gets up before he can work up a reply, if he’s even capable of one. The mattress isn’t heavy, isn’t too thick, but she hopes it will be enough to smother the flames. She grabs hold of it as best as she can and rushes towards the growing flame before she can stop to question how stupid this all is.

Heat assaults her and flames find her – fingers, feet, arms, and she can smell her hair as it singes. Cosette throws the mattress down where the fire burns its hottest and then stomps on it, pushes on it. Heat sears her cheek. She ignores it and keeps pressing in with the mattress, grabbing hold of it when the smoke rises and the flames shift. Cosette keeps moving it, choking and coughing until the house is finally dark.

She drops the mattress and backs off before falling down to her knees a foot away from Sam. She coughs until she throws up and then kneels there, shaking and staring at the puddle of her vomit that’s just visible in the weak shafts of moonlight filtering in through the smoke.

Her victory lasts as long as it takes to crawl to Sam. He’s gone rigid again and she doesn’t need the light to know that something dark is creeping along the veins and capillaries beneath his skin. Whatever this is, addiction or poisoning by the demon that had ridden her, it’s still going to kill him.

Cosette fumbles in the smoky darkness towards the couch. She finds Sam’s heavier bag by feel and unzips it, feeling for his jeans. She comes across a flashlight, turns it on and keeps digging. His phone is in his jeans. She can call someone, call his friend Ruby who Sam had said was experienced in dealings with demons.

She finds his flask first. Cosette almost throws it aside, but clutches it tightly before her fingers can let go of it. He’d tried to get what was in it and she thought it was blood, but maybe, just maybe. She grabs hold of the flashlight and hurries to the remains of the shelves on the wall.

The plastic grocery sack is on the floor along with everything else and though the contents look mostly smashed, the Gatorade bottle is intact. She sets the flashlight on the floor amidst the rubble caused by Sam’s fit and opens the flask. The smell of blood is still there, still strong, but it’s the rank odor of rotten eggs that assaults her, that leads her to believe that she might be right, that she might still have a chance of keeping him alive long enough to get help.

Cosette spills most of the Gatorade on herself, but gets some into the flask. She doesn’t know how much is too much, doesn’t know if this is something that will still retain potency after being diluted, she just has some dim memory of adding water to a nearly empty shampoo bottle to extend the life of her dwindling supply.

The flask sloshes wetly when she gives it a little shake. She recaps it and shakes it harder, doing her best to mix the rank contents. Cosette then crawls back to Sam and pulls his stiff, shaking body to her until his head is in her lap.

“You have to drink this, Sam,” she says opening the flask. “Just… just a little bit, baby, and I swear it’ll all get better.” She can’t even bring herself to feel horror anymore at the thought of what she’s trying to coax him to do. She pries open his jaw with her thumb and pours a little bit into his mouth.

Sam sputters and chokes. Then he gasps, eyes widening a little as he manages to swallow some down. His throat works again and he doesn’t spit it out. Encouraged, Cosette pours again. Tiny little bits that he can manage. Sam swallows each time. Then he reaches for the flask with shaking hands. They’re no longer twisted into claws and he grabs hold easily.

Sam drinks like a man dying of thirst, drinks until there’s no more left and he falls back into her lap with a long sigh.

She smoothes his hair back from his brow, humming some mostly forgotten tune that her mother had sung to her long ago. She stays with him until his eyes close, until his breathing evens out with what she hopes is sleep.

Then Cosette takes the flashlight and starts her search again for his cell phone.

*

“Sam?”

Cosette gets to her feet, startled and uncertain. The woman, Ruby, had said she was close, but it hasn’t been five minutes since she set the phone down. She’s just gotten Sam somewhat more comfortable. She didn’t expect help to arrive so soon and has been so intent on making a pillow for Sam out of his clothes that she didn’t even hear the approach of a car.

She gets up and goes to the other room, taking the flashlight with her. There’s a slim shadow in the doorway.

Cosette shines the light and sees who she guesses must be Ruby standing just outside. Somehow, from the cool, capable tone of her voice and the way Sam had talked to her on the phone, she expected someone older, but Ruby looks to be about the same age as Cosette herself.

She’s beautiful, curvaceous and slim. Somehow elegant despite the casual nature of her dress and Cosette finds that she feels suddenly shabby and dirty. She rubs at her sore skin where she imagines she must be smudged and takes a couple of tiny steps forward.

“Are you… Ruby, right?”

“Yeah,” she answers. “You gonna let me in or what?”

Cosette stares at the open door in confusion, not sure if Ruby’s messing with her or if there’s something that she’s missing. The other woman sighs and mutters “I don’t have time for this crap.” Ruby pulls a knife from her boot, making Cosette retreat a little bit and she wonders if she’s made a mistake, wonders what she’ll do if this woman hasn’t come to help Sam at all.

Ruby doesn’t seemed concerned with her uncertainty, doesn’t really seem to be concerned with her at all. She just bends down and scratches at the floor with her knife. She works at it until one of the lines of Sam’s weird, Satanic symbol is marred and then looks up, an irritated little grimace flashing across her features.

“That’s my Sam,” she says, “Meticulous, meticulous, meticulous.”

Ruby throws the knife up towards the ceiling and it shouldn’t have done anything, should have just clattered to the floor, but penetrates the plaster, piercing the center of the symbol painted into the plaster.

“That ought to do it,” Ruby says and steps inside, holding out her hand. The knife trembles as Cosette watches it and then drops into her outstretched palm.

“Who are you?” Cosette asks. _What are you?_

“Listen…”

“Cosette,” she interrupts. “My name, I mean. I’m Cosette.”

“Right,” Ruby replies. “Cosette, whatever. Listen, thank you for looking after Sam. I can’t tell you how important he is to me and I can’t tell you how grateful I am for this.”

“He saved me,” she says simply. “What else was I going to do? What’s… what’s wrong with him? Is he, it’s just…”

“Just?” Ruby asks with one eyebrow arching.

“It’s like he’s sick. No, it’s like he’s coming down off of something, like a-a withdrawal and he said, he said he wasn’t. Said the demon in me poisoned him somehow, but it threw him around the room. Threw him and he’s been so sick and when I watered down whatever’s in his flask, he drank it and got better and I think it’s blood. Is it blood?” She blurts it all out in a rush and Ruby just regards her coolly for a long moment.

“It’s hard to explain,” Ruby says finally. “And I don’t really think I should.”

“But…”

Ruby’s features soften. “Look, honey, you’ve been through a lot and you’re a brave, brave girl, but it’s okay now. I’m gonna take care of Sam. It’s what I do and like I said, he’s very important to me. But, you’ve done enough, more than anyone else would have. Don’t worry about it anymore, okay? Sam’s fine. He’s going to be just fine. I’ll take care of him.”

She takes Cosette’s hand and leads her to the door. “Go be happy. It’s what Sam will want and I know he’ll get better that much more quickly knowing that you’re okay.”

Cosette’s mouth opens and she’s not sure why she’s balking at the thought of handing Sam over to someone more capable of helping, not sure why she isn’t just waving adios and heading off to find some place that could maybe become home again. She’s less sure when Ruby presses a fat roll of money into her hand and Cosette feels nothing but anger.

“No. No, I need to stay. I need to see him…”

All of the gentleness is gone from Ruby’s voice and her face. “You need to go. Now. I’m letting you go, do you understand me? I’m letting you go. Be smart, Cosette. Go away.”

“No. I…”

Ruby shuts the door in her face.

Cosette stands there, stricken, furious, and trembling. She looks at the door for a long moment and then shoves the money into the pocket of her jeans. She can feel Ruby on the other side of the door. She doesn’t say anything and Cosette doesn’t either. She retreats a step and then two, then turns and walks slowly down the steps to Sam’s car.

She runs her fingers along the cool metal and then leans against it, resting her head against the roof. It’s as solid and comforting beneath her as Sam had been when he wasn’t scaring the daylights out of her. Something about it makes her feel safe, makes her feel bold and, after steeling herself for a little bit, she creeps back towards the house.

She can hear the low murmur of voices drifting out from the open, ruined window she’d worked so hard on earlier in the day.

“Sam, look at you. You’re a mess.”

“Ruby.”

“I’m here, Sam. I’m here.”

“I-I’m sorry, Ruby. About this, about Houston. Everything. You were right.”

“Shh, now. It’s not your fault. I should have listened to you. I was just so scared, Sam. I thought that demon was going to kill you and I know you wanted to save the poor guy it was possessing, but… I just can’t lose you, you know. You’re too important. You have too much to do.”

“I know. Ruby… I’m… I feel…”

“I know you do, Sam. I told you, a succubus can get her hooks in you and look at what that whoring bitch did to you. You’re all a mess.”

“I didn’t know it would be like this. I swear, Ruby. I think-I think she almost killed me. If Cosette hadn’t, if she’d left me…”

Cosette closes her eyes and puts a hand to her mouth to keep from making a sound. She’s sure that if anything came out right now that it would be a sob, perhaps even a wailing cry.

“You’re lucky,” Ruby agrees. “She’s a smart girl.”

“Where is she?”

“Safe,” Ruby croons. “She’s gone and she’s safe. We have to take care of you now.”

“Please…”

“And you have to listen to me from now on, Sam.”

“Yes. Anything, Ruby, just… please.”

“It’s okay, Sam. It’s okay, I’m going to take care of you. I promised I would. We just need to flush out your system and it’ll be like nothing ever happened. You’ll be fine before you know it.”

There’s a little hiss that Cosette can’t make sense of, it sounds like the sort of intake of breath she might have uttered the night Sam made love to her thinking that she was his Jess. Then there’s Ruby’s low, sweet crooning voice again.

“That’s it. There now. It’s going to be all right now, Sam. You’ll see. It’s going to be all right.”

She can hear nothing now. Cosette assumes that to mean that all is going well and that she can leave all of this behind her. She’s alive. Sam’s alive. Like Ruby had said, everything is going to be all right.

She still heads back to the front porch and up the steps. She opens the door, knows that Ruby must have heard the old wood creak open, but she doesn’t come to meet her or call out a dismissal from where she’s tending to Sam.

Cosette walks slowly into the house and stops on the threshold between the two rooms.

Ruby’s cradling Sam much as Cosette had done. She has her wrist to Sam’s mouth and his fingers are gripping her arm tight as he holds her to him, sucking away at her greedily while a tiny line of blood trickles down from his lips.

She gasps and Ruby’s head snaps up. She doesn’t look surprised, just annoyed. She doesn’t say anything, but glares hard at Cosette, her eyes flashing to a dark black in the glow from the flashlight.

Cosette clamps her hand over her mouth and looks at Sam. He doesn’t even open his eyes, doesn’t seem to know that she’s there. He’s immune to everything but the blood that he’s drinking from Ruby’s wrist.

Her gaze darts from Sam to Ruby’s unnatural black stare and then Cosette turns and finally, finally runs. She doesn’t stop for most of the night.

*

Sam finds her at the bus station the next morning. It’s two towns over and had taken her two rides to get to, but somehow, Cosette isn’t surprised. She is, she supposes, predictable.

She’s too weary to flinch when he puts her bags down by her feet and sits next to her. She isn’t even sure that pulling away from him is the overriding response anyway. She wants to hug him and after what she saw, she isn’t really sure why, but she does. She doesn’t, just sits quietly next to him, reaching up only to tug at the new bandana the covers her singed hair. The burns and old track marks are hidden by the sleeves of the new shirt she’d gotten in a gas station. It’s too big and it’s some kind of hunting jersey with a deer on the front.

“I bought you a ticket,” Sam tells her when she doesn’t say anything.

Cosette holds up the ticket she’d purchased earlier. “Have one.”

“Oh,” Sam replies. “That’s good. Where you headed?”

She doesn’t really know. Cosette looks again at the ticket she’s been holding. “St. Louis, I guess. Never been.”

Sam makes a small humming noise and shakes his head. “Told you, you need looking after. St. Louis is a bad idea, Cosette. It's good sized and way too close to Chicago. The cops will have faxed your picture to St. Louis and just about every major city and good sized town in the midwest.”

“You don’t know that,” she tells him.

“Kinda do,” he replies. “St. Louis a likely place to run from Chicago. Chances are pretty good that you’ll get picked up and I don’t think anyone’s going to believe that a demon killed all of those guys.”

She juts her chin out, holds stubbornly to her ticket, but feels her eyes start to prickle a little bit. He’s right and she should have known that.

“Hey,” Sam tells her and puts his arm around her shoulders. He’s no longer burning up from the inside, doesn’t smell like sweat, but he still feels so warm and solid next to her. She remembers how he’d held Ruby’s wrist tight so that he could drink from it. Cosette doesn’t lean into him as she thinks about it, but she still kind of wants to.

“It’s not your fault,” Sam says gently. “There aren’t a lot of people who have lived through this kind of thing, who understand it. It isn’t your fault, but you just have to be a little careful for a while. It’ll blow over eventually and so long as you don’t get arrested or anything, it’ll be fine. I promise that it will.”

Cosette looks up at him finally and finds Sam transformed. There are still faint shadows beneath his eyes like he’s wanting for sleep, but the waxy paleness to his skin is gone. He looks strong, healthy, and almost unnaturally alive except for the quiet grief in his eyes that doesn’t seem to go away. She knows that’s what’s left of Dean inside of him, knows that it’s a sign of his ache, his loss. She saw the same look in her own eyes this morning in the mirror of the gas station bathroom. Her mother was in that look, but Sam was too.

“Where should I go?”

“Well, this ticket,” and Sam puts it into her hands, “is to Idaho.”

“Idaho?”

“Mmhmm. You’ll like it, lots of stars,” he says with a small smile. “There’s a friend there. Daniel and his wife, Alandra. I haven’t seen them in a long time, but they’re good people. I talked to them this morning and Daniel will look after you for a while. He and Alandra have been through something similar and they understand.”

“They…” she lowers her voice, though there’s no one around to hear her. “They were possessed?”

“No,” Sam whispers back, his voice warm and a little amused like they’re sharing confidences. “Alandra’s ex-boyfriend was a ghost. A very, very nasty one. My dad, my brother, and me sort of took care of it for them a long, long time ago.”

“Why would they want me there?” Cosette asks him. “I… I can’t do anything. I don’t know anything.”

Sam’s arm tightens around her shoulders. “That’s the craziest thing I’ve heard. You can do a lot, more than you know. You can jump rooftops and take care of people. You took care of me. You saved my life,” he whispers in her ear. Sam kisses the top of her head and gets up. “Like I said, you’re amazing.”

He turns to go. Cosette gets up, both bus tickets falling from her hands. She leaves her bags where Sam had put them on the floor.

“Sam!”

He catches her in his arms, holds her tightly while she clings to him.

“Come with me,” Cosette begs him. “I’ll go to Idaho, I swear I will, but come with me.”

“I can’t,” Sam tells her. He pulls back and puts his hands on her cheeks. “I can’t. The thing that killed my brother is out there and it’s going to hurt a lot of people. I have to stop her. I have to. No one else can do it, do you understand?”

“No, I don’t,” she says honestly. “I don’t understand any of this. Last night, what I saw… Ruby, Sam. Ruby, she’s a…”

“I know,” he interrupts gently, but firmly. “Cosette, I know what she is.”

“But…but you. I saw you and… Why, Sam? Why?”

“Because,” he says, “she’s helping me. No,” he says when she opens her mouth to refute him. “She is. You’ve heard stories of angels falling from Heaven to do evil things, right? Well, it works the other way with demons, sometimes. She’s helping me save people. And I have to save people. I…” he falters a little bit and the faint ghost of grief in his eyes flares more brightly until it’s not faint at all. “My brother wanted us to help people. It’s what I have to do. People like you.”

“Would he want you hurt?” she asks him. “Would he want you sick like you were?” _Would he want you drinking blood from a demon and, oh God, Sam, do you even know you’re addicted to it? Because I do and I think your demon does, too._

“No, he wouldn’t,” Sam sighs. “But, I didn’t want him to die for me either. Things don’t work out like we want sometimes. All we can do is keep trying and that’s what I’m going to do.”

Cosette hears a car door and looks up. Ruby’s leaning against the side of Sam’s car, staring at them. Her eyes are normal in the morning sun, but the look of irritation and menace is still there. She remembers Ruby telling Sam that a succubus could get her hooks in him. Maybe she’s isn't that kind of demon, but Cosette knows Ruby has him just the same. She slumps.

“You told me that we’re not supposed to forget, that we’re supposed to keep hurting forever for the people we’ve lost. Don’t make me hurt for you, okay? Stay,” it’s a stupid request, but she makes it anyway, “stay safe.”

“I’ll do my best,” Sam promises her. He doesn’t make it sound like a hollow promise, but she supposes that it is.

She looks up at him. “Will I ever…”

“No,” Sam tells her. And then he smiles, brushing at a lock of hair that’s escaped from her bandana. “Well… maybe someday?”

Cosette stands on her tip toes, defiantly ignores Ruby’s stare, and wraps her arms tight around his neck. “Thank you.”

Sam bends down and kisses her. It’s a soft kiss until he deepens it, until he winds his fingers in the trail of her ruined hair at the nape of her neck and pulls her in until all that she can see and feel is him. Sam groans a little bit as he pulls his mouth away and holds her fiercely. He kisses her one more time. When he sighs a name softly against her lips, it’s hers this time.

He presses one last kiss to her forehead and whispers: “ _Tout ira bien.”_

Then he’s gone. Ruby spares her one last, displeased glance and gets in the car at Sam’s prompting. They drive off just as the bus pulls in. Cosette doesn’t know if it’s the bus to Idaho or St. Louis. She’ll have to go to the counter and check because she’s not going to St. Louis.

Cosette wipes at her eyes and turns back to her bags. “Mom,” she says to thin air, “you’d laugh if you heard me say this, but I think I need to learn a little French.”

*

Epilogue – May, two years later

The raw roast sits obscenely in a golden shaft of late afternoon sunlight. It’s a pink hunk of flesh surrounded by scattered carrots and peeled potatoes in a smear of brown sauce and new onions. Sunlight’s glinting off the shimmering new crack in the glass baking dish, blinding her, hastening her tears, but Cosette doesn’t look away. Nor, does she pick up the telephone she’s dropped along with tonight’s dinner even though she can hear Daniel’s voice, tinny and small, still coming from it.

She just sits numbly and lets the hurt creep in.

 _Sam’s dead,_ she thinks. It’s like a needle being driven into her heart and she supposes that she shouldn’t be surprised, but she is. She thinks she should probably be denying it right now. Daniel said he’d had it from a friend who’d had it from Dean and how can that even be? How does a guy who’s dead and in hell call people up to say that Sam died saving the world?

It doesn’t make sense at all, but she can’t bring herself to argue it. It feels right. It’s shockingly painful to hear it after spending two years thinking that if Sam has lived this long, he might just keep on living and maybe someday find his way to her, but it does feel right. It feels like the truth.

Upstairs she can hear Alandra and Jonah going to war over bath time, Jonah stridently crying “No! No! Mama!” because he knows he doesn’t take a bath before dinner but isn’t old enough to realize that running through cow shit rearranges bath time plenty. Cosette knows that she needs to get up, that she should clean the wreck she’s made of dinner, help Alandra fight with the boy, but she can only sit, blinded by her tears and the sunlight on newly broken glass.

She remembers Sam telling her that maybe loss wasn’t supposed to go away, that maybe it was supposed to hurt forever. Her breath hitches and Cosette finds herself hoping that Sam was wrong, that pain does eventually recede. But, as she hears her son wail “no fair!” she doesn’t think it will.

“God, Sam,” Cosette cries and covers her eyes with her hands. “So much for someday.”  
  



End file.
